Awaiting the spring tide

Now at the halfway point of winter, we are about to face the best and worst of the hard season’s ever shifting moods.

The best news is that the days are fast growing longer, considering that we have been allotted an increase of almost three-quarters of an hour of daylight since the winter solstice. The bad news is that as the winter days lengthen, the cold grows stronger.

As Captain Tom Bunion admitted as he tamped another load of tobacco into his pipe, “There’s still hope whenever one finds himself having gone all the way hard aground to the bottom, there is mighty few directions left to go but wait for a rising tide to lift us up.”

We are hard aground in winter, but following Old Tom’s perspective, we can begin looking beyond these cold, dark days to brighter days that in time will bring the rising tide of spring.

This story was originally published January 23, 2016 at 1:42 PM with the headline "Awaiting the spring tide."