February Sunshine

In one of his books, Tom Robbins described February as lard on white bread. [I’d go even further… it’s like lard on white Wonderbread – a product my mom used to buy only to wad up into the balls she used to clean the keys on our piano. She thought that that particular brand was the absolute nadir of all breads.] Actually I think February is the absolute nadir of all months. Even with only 28 days it’s too long. You have to wait until it’s over before you can even think about spring. And Valentines Day – especially if you have no true (or untrue) love – doesn’t help at all. You can see what it has done to me. I haven’t posted a blog (is that the technologically correct phrase?) since Feb. 5. Now it’s the 11th! I’ll be thrown out of the blog kingdom. Actually, there’s no real excuse to succumb to February doldrums in a state that has so much sunshine. [Believe me, it’s more understandable in places like Youngstown, Ohio or Detroit, Michigan or even Chicago, Illinois. I’ve spent Februarys in each of those cities – none of which had half as much sunshine as Loveland, Colorado.] But it’s still cold, for Pete’s sake.


Current events seem to accent the negative – Republicans zooming in on abortion rights, campaigns against women in Iran and the Congo.


No wait – I read good news about the Congo. What I hadn’t known was that, according to the NY Times, “For years, diplomats, aid workers, academics and government officials have been vexed almost to the point of paralysis about how to attack [the country’s] staggering problem of sexual violence, in which hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, many quite sadistically, by the various armed groups who haunt the hills of eastern Congo.” So the American woman who wrote “The Vagina Monologues”, Eve Ensler was in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, this week to open “City of Joy” – a compound of homes, classrooms, courtyards and verandas where small groups of Congolese women will be groomed to become ‘an army of women’ – community leaders trained in self defense, computers, and trades and farming who, after graduation, will return to their communities to empower others. NY Times again: "The center, built partly by the hands of the women themselves, cost around $1 million. UNICEF contributed a substantial amount, and the rest was raised from foundations and private donors by Ms. Ensler’s advocacy group, V-Day. Google is donating a computer center."


WOW. Go Eve Ensler! Go Congolese women!


Okay, okay … the sun IS shining and Spring may show up after all.