JANUARY: the wintry first month of the year

Photo: Januar, Leandro Bassano (16th c.), Common Domain

I love this painting by Bassano. It is his attempt to depict the Northern Hemisphere's experiencing of the month of January. It is one of those paintings that causes you to keep searching. Your first viewing makes the point: January is cold, raw, and barren. But as you keep searching out the details of the painting you discover Bassano attempting to put everything he could imagine into the painting which describes the affect of the wintry month. Every character, every stick of wood, every inch of drab color has a message of January's discomfort and creative attempts to overcome it.

Appropriately named for the Roman god, Janus, whose two faces allow him to look forward and backwards at the same time, January is like that, isn't it? We spend a lot of time in this month remembering the past year and postulating on that which will occur in the coming year. January is fickle.

* New Calendars are distributed, every year becoming more and more eclectic. No longer limited to major national holidays, the tiny boxes of the new calender now remind us of such vital things as National Pie Baking Day, Grandparents' Day, Administrative Professional Day (formerly Secretary's Day ,) and other urgent 24 hour periods. I remember years when we have burned the previous year's calendar ceremoniously, like shaking the dust from our sandals for a year we'd sooner forget.

* We are encouraged to make New Year's resolutions, obligatory promises to lose weight, give up smoking, knock strokes off our golf game, and other such significant plans which, predictably, go by the wayside within a matter of hours or days.

* It is time to begin the process of gathering the data necessary for completing the IRS forms, due on April 15, which identify the losses or successes of the previous year. Sometimes, if one is lucky, we acknowledge our less-than-efficient act of letting the U.S. Government hold our money at no interest, to be returned in a check we are convinced is a windfall.

* The President goes to Congress with his State of the Union address, identifying the advances and short-comings of the past year and laying the groundwork for legislation and programs to bring about a successful and safe new year. It is an exercise in clapping, standing, cheering, poker-facing and jeering by Congress and members of the Administration, and measured restraint on the part of robed justices.

* While conference play barely begins in January it is a time of prognostication about the makeup of the Final Four in NCAA basketball. Wise and "in the know" sports commentators take to the media to let the rest of the nation in on the secrets they "know" which are as fickle as the snowstorms and thaws of mid-winter.

Going back to the painting by Bassano, I find a beauty in the depiction of January. That, too, is part of the two faces of Janus: miserably cold and wintry January but majestic and snow-covered mountains. Desperate attempts to gather fire-wood and ingenious fireplace pumps, copper bed warmers, and woven woolen wraps. There is something about the mid-winter which is cleansing: preparing the way for the return of Spring; new growth, and the fresh, warm breezes which bring soft rain and the blossoming of spectacular flowers; births of farm animals and the promise of new life.

Bassano painted a series of depictions of the various months. By the time May and June paintings emerge, there is the beginning of the use of reds, greens, and yellow tones in his paintings.

Sloshing through the fresh snowfall predicted for today in Providence, I'll try to remember my romantic thoughts of this early morning expose of the month of January.