Hi everyone! Emeshe here, and I’m going to make the controversial statement that I love this time of year. Hear me out. Notorious for being beige, bleak, and boring, when the novelty of winter has worn off but spring still seems hopelessly far away, early February definitely isn’t winning any popularity contests. But there’s something special to me about its quiet, unpretentious nature, its gentle, but noticeably lengthening, days, its ho-hum hopefulness. It’s a time for planning the year ahead, ripe with the possibilities of a new spring⎼a spring that reality hasn’t gotten its grubby hands on yet.

I think of late winter as that cantankerous, misunderstood person who gets a lot of crap. She’s not a charming socialite like spring. She’s not a dazzling diva like mid-summer. Nor is she poetic and witchy like fall. Yet, if you’re having a hard day she’ll listen to you without judgment. She won’t put on airs. Unembellished. Unadorned. She’ll gruffly tell you that everything will turn around soon, that it’s always darkest before the dawn, and then make you a mushy, hardy meal to keep you going.

No, February in Missouri isn’t particularly showy, but that makes the little things pop: the light at 5:16 pm turning the dead grasses golden, the taste of fresh, yellow cream after the birth of a calf, the silhouettes of trees at twilight like upside down lungs. It makes relationships pop too. The extra time to chat, to check in, to listen. There isn’t much going on so people have the free time to be with each other.

For this reason, we choose late winter to hold our annual retreat. The new year quickens without fanfare, and it feels right to gather and look towards the season ahead. We come together in the well-loved Common House to share ideas with one another, talk DR politics, and eat snacks after our months of social withdrawal. There hasn’t been much going on so we’re excited to chat rather than burned out by the prospect. Well, some of us. The outdoors aren’t constantly screaming for attention so the indoors welcome us. Bleakness, beigeness, and boringness have their gifts. They help us ask ourselves big questions. What sustains us during scarcity? When things die back, what possibilities do they clear room for? What inside us thrives when the world around us sleeps?

To close up my case for the appreciation of DR late winter, I’ll leave you with this image. Lately, if you go outside at night and close your eyes, you hear silence. Silence, silence, silence, and then the raucous honks of geese. When this happens, I look up to see if I can catch a glimpse of them⎼ their silhouettes blacking out clusters of stars or moonlight bouncing off their wings. I rarely manage. The sky is too vast and I’ve usually forgotten my glasses at home, leaving them to nestle snugly in their case by my bedside. While I’m scanning the sky, the coyotes will start up their hollering, or the bard owls, adding their own reckless cacophony to the soundscape. This is the time of year for big and brazen beings like these. They fill the empty cold nights without competition from the soft, miniature lives born in spring. Soon they will share the stage with countless peeps and buzzes and chirps, the wet smell of melting snow promises it, but for now they are the soloists singing over the barren hills: life is not gone, life is returning.

Emeshe Amade has accepted the role of co-lead link for DR’s nonprofit, CSCC. Congratulations, Emeshe!