Gray sky blues

I really don’t like November.

.As far as I’m concerned the only good things about November are that it’s the month when I get to eat Thanksgiving dinner and that the eleventh month makes the rest of the year seem quite pleasant in comparison. As a player in Minnesota’s great pageant of the seasons, November really deserves to be booed off stage.

By and large, there’s only one word to describe this month...bleak. It’s cold, it’s damp, it’s nasty. November in Minnesota is fall without the pretty sliding into winter with no hope of spring.

Not even the goofiest optimist can keep up their positive mental attitude as they open the season’s first heating bill beneath an iron gray November sky. It’s a month of short, dark, sleety days and long chill nights. It’s a month of regretting not rolling up the hose and putting on the storm windows while dreading Christmas shopping and adjusting to the municipal ritual of alternate-side parking.

There’s a depressing certainty about November. As we set our clocks back we know that, climatologically speaking, it’s all downhill until we’ve turned the first page on the new year’s calendar. November is nature’s way of driving that certainty home.

It’s in November that we hear the first temperature reports couched with the proviso “and with the Wind Chill Factor, it feels like...”

It’s also the month of the first serious snow, and the accompanying realization that, if all goes wrong, we will be looking at that first snow of November until it’s washed away by the first showers of spring.

It’s true that from Halloween to April Fool’s climate overtakes taxes as being the favorite reason for folks wanting to flee the Good Life in Minnesota, but never do the world’s sweaty places seem more alluring than right after a brisk walk in a freezing November rain.

There’s no way around it, December and January in the Land of 10,000 (frozen) Lakes are just plain, God-awful cold. But at least December offers us Christmas, the promise of Tom and Jerry’s and a new pair of warm, woolly socks. There is a stark beauty to the blue-white cold of January, as long as it can be admired from the warm side of a big, bay window.

By February, we begin to have faith that the worst is over. The dank slush of March is pregnant with the promise of spring.

The slush of November is just dank.

But it’s not just the weather. For most of us, November is an unpleasantly cluttered month, cluttered with the year’s comings and goings.

It’s depressing enough to look out my un-winterized window at the yard-full of chores I’ve been putting off since early September and which will no doubt still be waiting for me come early spring without watching my more enterprising neighbor putting up strings of colored lights and otherwise getting ready to deck the halls.

Holidays start bumping into each other in November. The Halloween pumpkin is slowly collapsing on the porch, the Thanksgiving turkey is in the freezer and the Christmas Sale catalogues are spread all over the living room. The remaining year becomes a scheduling nightmare as we try to decide who’s family will spend which holiday where, how to fit three “must go” holiday parties into the same Saturday night and the sure knowledge that we’ll be putting up with “Parump-a-pum-pum” and “Fa-la-la” waiting in endless checkout lines until we’re days past the solstice.

Yes, the elections are over, but the days still get darker.

November…Bah! Humbug!