January, the break-up, and put-back month

By Nellie Curtiss ….

The white light streams through the blue planet’s atmosphere on a mission to melt the snow packed and icy trails around here, and with the help of hardy house finches and speckled sparrows, my mind travels back to a walk in the woods outside the Turpin Road condo in Anchorage. There I found sleeping bears of snow clinging to the fir tree limbs then blowing away in one thought or another. 

The walk was in January or February or some wintery month when family emotions raced rancid. People say January is the break-up month because feelings mimic the climate’s growing iciness.  It was one evening like that when parents prowled through consequences of distances, dips, and duties. 

The white light streams through the ailing planet’s air on its way to breath that will bring the spring and new life.  Already ranchers and part-time sheep stewards worry about a goat or sheep due to birth. The thirty-below temperatures would strike a lamb before gasping and snuff out a wool-less heartbeat.   Still the pull to bring water and feed conquers the human resolve to stay a while longer by the fire. 

Somewhere strategies for the New Year plod past one memory and then another; frost in the tundra melts even more; ice from a Greenland glacier drops into the ocean—an unexpected tragedy of carbon gone amuck.  Not unlike the dire detonator of feelings gone by, the once green and thriving mother earth has Co2 astronomical flu, or Covid19, where waves push deeper into the coasts, where icy roads catch fossil-fueled machines and drivers in a blizzard and southern style oxy-morons, where science and fact are denounced and ignored.

A cataclysm, the type that fished and squirmed until species of another time died and changed into crude oil knocks at our Jungian strings, and for sure our culture of violence and consumption.  Our species no longer honors our ancestors or the prairie schooners and aborigines traversing the wilderness; we no longer embrace a loving God’s edict to take care of the world and all within; instead, we honor plastic, pumps and pearls ripened in oil.  The cataclysm that wakes now could turn back the time when the earth was sparce and human less without the forming community built from one cell to another. 

Still, there’s time to turn back the astronomical flu to open up to streaming lights but close the ozone rift established by too much carbon in the oceans, in the permafrost, and in the forests.  Carbon is muscling out the oxygen in favor of its own decay. This January journey begins with us when we choose to recycle, bicycle and cycle through choices to promote survival of the planet, plants, and people.  Walk along the trail with the dancing wildlife nibbling at the branches. Strike an arpeggio melody with the land, air, water, and life.

— Nellie Curtiss is a retired college educator and long-time local columnist. Reach her at columnsbynellie.com or email her at columnsbynellie@gmail.com