What color is February? #phenology?

Once upon a time, I might have answered "White," for the snow that seems to be forever falling. But, after scanning the pictures I've taken for the past handfuls of Februarys, I want to claim that February is the Red Month. Here's why:

Valentine's Day treats on red

Photo by J. Harrington

The easy, obvious, answer comes in five days, when we celebrate Valentine's Day. Hearts are red, candy, much of it, is red. Cookies are covered with red frosting or jam (raspberry or strawberry). That's stuff that we humans pretty much seem to take for granted.

red osier dogwood brightening in February

Photo by J. Harrington

February is also the month when red osier dogwood begins to turn bright red, helping to return color to the local floodplains. We're beginning to see hints of it and are hopeful for bright red branches soon. If we get enough snow melt, February can bring glimpses of British soldier lichens, with their red caps.

male cardinal on February snow

Photo by J. Harrington

We realize that male cardinals are red all year 'round, but their cardinal red is often highlighted in February by its contrast with the glistening whiteness of freshly fallen snow.

February sunrise

Photo by J. Harrington

Finally, for now, February makes it obvious that the sun is returning, days lengthen, and yet, dawn occurs late enough that there's little suffering involved in getting to see a spectacular sunrise.

Some of these bursts of red may occur other months. Red strawberries raspberries ripen in Summer. Apples in Autumn, but, except for Christmas season, I can't think of another month with so much red becoming obvious throughout the countryside. Can you? If you can, we may have to start lists and compare which month brings the most red to us. Or, are we looking for the month with red that's most obvious?

The History of Red

By Linda Hogan

First

there was some other order of things

never spoken

but in dreams of darkest creation.

Then there was black earth,

lake, the face of light on water.

Then the thick forest all around

that light,

and then the human clay

whose blood we still carry

rose up in us

who remember caves with red bison

painted in their own blood,

after their kind.

A wildness

swam inside our mothers,

desire through closed eyes,

a new child

wearing the red, wet mask of birth,

delivered into this land

already wounded,

stolen and burned

beyond reckoning.

Red is this yielding land

turned inside out

by a country of hunters

with iron, flint and fire.

Red is the fear

that turns a knife back

against men, holds it at their throats,

and they cannot see the claw on the handle,

the animal hand

that haunts them

from some place inside their blood.

So that is hunting, birth,

and one kind of death.

Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.

Red was the infinite fruit

of stolen bodies.

The doctors wanted to know

what invented disease

how wounds healed

from inside themselves

how life stands up in skin,

if not by magic.

They divined the red shadows of leeches

that swam in white bowls of water:

they believed stars

in the cup of sky.

They cut the wall of skin

to let

what was bad escape

but they were reading the story of fire

gone out

and that was a science.

As for the animal hand on death’s knife,

knives have as many sides

as the red father of war

who signs his name

in the blood of other men.

And red was the soldier

who crawled

through a ditch

of human blood in order to live.

It was the canal of his deliverance.

It is his son who lives near me.

Red is the thunder in our ears

when we meet.

Love, like creation,

is some other order of things.

Red is the share of fire

I have stolen

from root, hoof, fallen fruit.

And this was hunger.

Red is the human house

I come back to at night

swimming inside the cave of skin

that remembers bison.

In that round nation

of blood

we are all burning,

red, inseparable fires

the living have crawled

and climbed through

in order to live

so nothing will be left

for death at the end.

This life in the fire, I love it.

I want it,

this life.

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