Here the Arizona winter has really felt (at least for around here) like winter. Monday’s windstorm trashed our backyard and pool, and it got below freezing the last two nights. The mornings are still damned dark when I do my India calls, although you can definitely see the days getting longer in the afternoons. Back home in Massachusetts, they’ve had a pretty easy run of it to date, but if Weatherbell.com’s Joe Bastardi is right it appears that things are about to change. At the gym, most of the newbies who started working out after the New Year have disappeared, leaving us regulars with better access to the machines and the weights. A perfect day, then, for a bit of poetry worthy of this month:

“Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white;
And reigns the winter’s pregnant silence still;
No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill,
And willow stems grow daily red and bright.
These are days when ancients held a rite
Of expiation for the old year’s ill,
And prayer to purify the new year’s will.”
– Helen Hunt Jackson, A Calendar of Sonnet’s: February

Hat tip: egreenway.com