CONTENDING WITH JANUARY DRABNESS

The color of January is drab unless, of course, she dons her ermine coat. She may put it on flake by flake as you're watching or don it in the dark of night to dazzle us the next morning. I like it both ways but, perhaps, the daytime flake by flake better. However, when the coat begins to tatter and pull apart at the seams, January is drab again.

I shouldn't refer to January by a feminine pronoun because this month was named for Janus, a Roman male, two-faced god. Two-faced in that the symbol for him has one face looking forward, one looking back.

The 31 days of sometimes drabness and all-the-time cold can become tiresome unless one can come up with some new endeavor or experiment that will provide moments of interest and anticipation.

With this in mind, I rummaged around in the basement for an old glass fishbowl that I've seen from time to time over the past 40 years or so. Really. It came down from Stephen's early goldfish days.

My project was to attempt a terrarium without any professional props or help.

Down the steps I went and proceeded to move old crocks, teapots, cake stands, vases, cracked cookie jars, Mason jars, minnow trap, broken figurines, mousetrap. ... Well, even though it is January, I can't give you the whole inventory of my basement shelves. Suffice it to say I found the fishbowl

Warm water with a foam of rainbow-hued bubbles quickly had the former fish mansion gleaming. With shovel in hand, I made my way to a place where I know moss has been growing for years. Had to skim off a thin layer of snow to see if I could detect any green moss. Nope. But I knew it was there. Just on a diet of no chlorophyll I surmised.

I skimmed off a suitably sized layer of it to bring into house warmth, thinking a little heat would make it show green again. It didn't, but still stubbornly believing it to be moss, I put a layer of sand in the bottom of the bowl, then a layer of homegrown topsoil and carefully tucked in the moss all around.

I knew exactly where a little clump of confederate violets grew last summer, so with trowel in hand, dug up a root and planted it in my shallow bed of moss, soil and sand. Would it grow and bloom? Who knows? Then I decided to "sacrifice" one of my flourishing green larkspur seedlings. I grudgingly thought I might be digging up the most beautiful pink one in the whole patch.

Whimsically, I buried a sunflower seed, snitched from the birdseed sack, a dried navy bean, a hollyhock seed and two grains of popcorn.

I had a tiny ceramic rabbit left over from a real bona fide terrarium of long ago. I placed it near the center, dampened the whole with Miracle-Gro enhanced water, set the bow in a potential sunny place. Thus I have something new to go look at every day to see what's happenin'.

Enamored with seeds and their possibilities as I am, it will afford me pleasure. What will sprout first? My guess is the bean seed. Will the transplanted larkspur roots reach the bottom and, feeling glass, send messages back up to the little lacy leaves that this matter is not worthy of pursuing? Everything else might do that, too, and I'll be left with moss, er, what looks suspiciously like chickweed, and the ceramic rabbit. Still, it will enliven January for me. Even chickweed has small white blossoms.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.