JOY ALONG THE WAY: FEBRUARY'S SHADOWY THOUGHTS

February creeps on, I guess. Sometimes it seems to stall in its cloudy, grumpy tracks, seeking, like frost on a granite boulder, to find toeholds in human patience and vulnerable bones. Perhaps that is why it is called by ancients the Purification Month. Maybe nature is gouging out pockets of irascibility, held-over grudges and a general mish-mash of mental, physical and spiritual shortcomings. If we can come through it all, we will be rewarded with the greening of the earth, the crocus, the host of daffodils and, in come cases, a more felicitous, flexible framework.

Waiting it out, even though tedious, is better than the purification rites of ancient times. I cringe when I read that women (why women?) were purified by pagan priests during the February Feast of Lupercalia. At that time these priests walked around the streets and, when they met a woman, they struck her with goatskin thongs to assure fertility and easy delivery. Any women for that today?

February, whose colors are usually thought of as red and white because of Valentine's Day and presidential birthdays is really, more historically given the color purple. Amethyst is the birthstone and violet the flower.

Ain't no violets showing themselves around here yet, although I know where lots of them will be in about 60 days and mentally give old February a fertility goatskin lash so there may be even more than I think. No purple henbit either, and I know where a lot of it will spread its little lavender, raggedy rugs.

At sweet winter sunset we may get a band of purple interwoven with the roseate gold above the horizon with the bottoms of higher, puffier clouds looking a little lavender-bruised. But these are quick passing things to be enjoyed in fast-forward time.

No deep purple birds either. However, if you're really intent on finding something slightly purplish to justify the color, examine the dogwood twigs just beneath the tightly-packed buds. Through a stretch of the imagination, you'll see some light purple.

I move my little blue glass bird along my improvised window ledge sundial of the morning. The sunny mornings have been so rare recently that when I do make the shadow adjustment, I'm surprised by the distance the new shadow falls at the exact appointed time as told by my exactly placed shelf clock.

The time is fast approaching when, even though "Phoebus 'gins arise" on time, there will be no shadow cast along the ledge at the exact time. Then, slowly, micromeasurements of the cast shadow will emerge to the south of the blue bird and shadows will reverse directions until the next solstice. Somehow, I feel akin to the ancient erectors of Stonehenge. Might as well align myself with something big and mysterious rather than just the Old Farmer's Almanac, interesting as it is. It is thought that a blue marble stone, along with two other stones, were placed within the "horseshoe" of Stonehenge to point to the risen sun on the first day of the summer solstice. We'll never really know.

A recent TV program depicted how a group of Englishmen and women tried to duplicate how two huge upright stones with lintel atop might have been accomplished with such tools as were available then (prehistoric) such as round logs, rope and human pulling power. They got it done! Such a TV program appeased my bad temper toward TCI for taking the Chicago Bulls largely out of my life. Little blue glass bird to Stonehenge to the Chicago Bulls! What an odd connection! Inscrutable as Stonehenge to anyone who doesn't follow the mazy, miasmic thinking of some people.

REJOICE!

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