Peggy Dover

I can always tell when another birthday is drawing nigh.

I wait for the coldest, foggiest, dreariest, mope-inducingest day of the year. I know when the cats come in dripping and smelling of mud that it must be close. When the bird seed needs wringing out, my birthday can’t be far off. Stores are stocked with space heaters, snow blowers and books on depression about the time I was born. My weather app says the sun is finally setting after 5 p.m., but what sun? Apparently, January is such a vacuum of interest that even the sun and Spectrum internet take the month off.

Mom always had things laid out in timely fashion for most of our home life. She canned fruits and vegetables in summer, always keeping her pantry dusted and in tip-top shape. She cooked and cleaned and readied her beautiful self in the mirror before Dad came home from work. Meals that set me drooling in remembrance appeared on the table at 5:30. I’m not sure how I could have jettisoned myself so far from maternal branches. Nevertheless, why in the wide world of Gerber did Mom decide to give birth smack in mid-winter? Out of boredom, perhaps?

Brother Alan came in the spring when lambs frolic and daffodils nod in the greeny grass. Sister Nancy arrived amid warm summer afternoons, blooming gardens, and cloudless nights. Not I.

I burst forth during the post-holiday blues, in the teeth of winter squalls, fog banks, and big white days without a slice of sunshine to warm our hearts with promise. Even the after-Christmas shoe bargains are reduced to disheveled shelves of size 12s. No wonder as a child I lived in a closet with my books and a blanket. Maybe I exaggerate a little. It wasn’t exactly a closet. It was that spic and span fruit room. I seem to remember one bare, 25-watt light bulb dangling from the damp ceiling as I listened to the steady pummeling of raindrops on our roof.

We celebrated my birthday by hunting slugs and feeding them to the chickens. Sometimes we played a game where we imagined pictures in the puddle shapes. They were generally clouds. Another fun thing was to see how many layers of clothing we could put on while reciting a favorite winter death poem. None of the aforementioned is true. I always have to clarify that.

I can’t change my birthdate legally, can I? If so, I’ll shave a few years off while I’m at it. I might rather be born in the fall: Oct. 17, 1972, is my new birthday. Spread the word.

Well, anyway, this year, instead of the usual coastal splash, I had planned to stay home and clean my gutters. However, sea billows call out and cannot be ignored. It will be a gloom-laden, foggy wet bluster bust over there as well, but at least I can stare out at the waves as gale-driven sand gives me a free dermabrasion treatment.

I’ll concentrate on being writerly and melancholy and think of albatrosses. I’ll have Lane make like a buoy. Let the wind and rain be hanged! And seagulls hang in mid-air like a mobile challenging the wind currents. I’m certain a story will surface, or maybe a periscope, or Nessie.

Speaking of buoys, I have a dear gaggle of friends who will lift me aloft for an extended celebration. They all have spring and summer birthdays, so they have a residual supply of glee to spread around.

A hearty handclasp to all forlorn bosom buddy Januarians out there. It is said that January babies are quirky. Ya think? Also, creative, I hope.

I wouldn’t really change my birthday. Over lo, these many and sundry years (fewer now, with the new birthdate), it has become as much a part of me as my name. Like my birthmark, it’s helped make my personality the conundrum it is.

So, I’ll lift a glass to the bleak mid-winter and sing a sea chanty like my robust ancestors before me.