Moving toward spring is central in my thoughts, just as it is this time every year. Once the holidays are behind us and we have celebrated the New Year, I count the days till spring. Thank heavens February is short (it won’t have 29 days again until 2015), because a consistent thought this time of year is: “If we can just make it through February, we’ll have more and more nice days.”
Of course I realize our climate here in Southern Indiana is actually quite temperate compared to most of our state and the greater Midwest. Still, I’m not a fan of cold weather, snow, or ice.
As January comes to a close this week, I’m reminded of this photo, a clipping from the Evansville Press. It sits framed on a library shelf in our family. Evansville Press photographer Don Goodaker (who also was a longtime friend of my husband’s family) took the picture of me walking our dog, Pearl Bodine, along the levee (now part of the Pigeon Creek Greenway), in Downtown Evansville on a nice day in February. Though I didn’t mark the clipping, I believe the year was 1991. Evansville still had an afternoon newspaper and we lived in the Riverside Historic District with the dog and two cats.
We still have two cats and a dog and I still walk the dog. Like the golden retriever mix Pearl in clipping, Jed, our 10-month old puppy, pretty much walks me, tugging me and lunging at squirrels and birds. (Pearl failed obedience training for posterior sniffing her classmates; I have yet to enroll Jed.)
I’m eager for a few warm dog-walking February days. It looks like the forecast for this week and early February is in my favor. And Groundhog Day is predicted to be partly cloudy.
