Februarys are rough.  I remember my first one in New York, back in 2006.  I was walking home from the subway after work and felt a weight of sadness that I couldn’t explain.  Sure, I was broke and perpetually single, but I was living in Manhattan!  I was happy!  And I’ve never been given to the downward swings of depression (just irrational anger and defensiveness).  Where is this coming from? I thought as the frigid air surrounded me on the pitch-dark-at-five-o’clock streets.

Soon after, I read more about the aptly named and now relevant-to-me Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and wished I had money for a trip to a tropical island, or a heat lamp.  But just knowing the cause of my emotional heaviness made it slightly lighter, and I forged ahead into February with an uplifted heart.  Then I remembered that Valentine’s Day was right around the corner.  Sigh.

Earlier this week I felt that familiar winter disillusion.  I woke up and looked out the window and everything was wet and gray.  Gone was the white novelty of snow, replaced by cold rain.  On days like these, spring feels further away than a reason to celebrate Valentine’s Day did to me back in 2006–far enough for me to answer Shelley’s “if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” with, “Hell yes it can, Percy.  You and that groundhog don’t know shit.”

That’s where I was a few days ago, cursing dead poets and helpless animals, and so I decided to pray.  It went a little something like this:  I feel dead inside.  I know it’s based on weather and not truth, but it feels like the most real thing in my heart.  I want it out.  I need…to be inspired.  I want to feel alive.

Yes, Jesus hears even melodramatic prayers.  I climbed into the car and headed out of the neighborhood for a most decidedly uninspiring yearly doctor’s appointment, my bag of emotional weariness on the passenger seat beside me.  Then the music came on.

Looking back you know
You had to bring me through
All that I was so afraid of
Though I questioned the sky now I see why
Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Looking back I see the lead of love

That was all it took, really–and why not?  What better place for God to show up than in music?  I put Caedmon’s Call on repeat and, yes, shed a few tears at the commonality of all biographies that don’t share you or me as the author, and are therefore personalized by love beyond measure.  Stories that matter not because of what my hands reach for, but for the hands that reach me.  Tales that include an inspiration not scratched and clawed at, but freely given.

I love my story.

I have forsaken the South in many ways over the years: refusing to wave at every person I pass on the street (The Husband has taken that mantle up for me and he’s not even Southern–oh for shame!), moving to New York, not making Junior League membership a top priority.  And loving winter, at least until February comes and I want to kill it.  But until then, I love cozy sweaters and stylish outerwear and snazzy boots.  I love visible breath and wood-burning fireplaces and packed snow.  I also love the orange leaves of fall and the first green of spring.  I love the seasons, all four, because there is something so necessary about each of them; something so natural and orderly and renewing about marking the passing of time with birth and death and life again.  And I have to remember all that when Shelley’s spring feels unreachably buried beneath Doppler forecasts swathed in green.  I have to remember that the seasons are as faithful in changing as the one who made them is in not.

But I don’t have to do the remembering all by myself.  He sends plenty of reminders–some set to music, some not.  Reminders in the form of a warm, dry restaurant and a table surrounded by people who have known me since college and are pouring sangria.  Reminders in the form of Post-It Notes from The Husband.  Reminders in the Much More to life that I happen to believe in and rest my soul upon.

I left the doctor’s office the other day and headed to my car in the parking deck.  To my left, I noticed a bank of ice left over from last month’s snowstorm, hidden in shade and clinging to life despite multiple rains and last weekend’s seventy degrees.  There are places in me like that, where light and life and truth take extra-long to reach–but they always get there.