February be gone!  March in March.

As I wave February goodbye, I know I should have known better than to get into the February blues.  However sternly I gave myself pep talks, that February funk still managed to settle upon me.

I do actually like winter, most of the time. I like the brisk weather; the dark nights help me sleep. The crisp snow can be breathtaking in many ways, but that monkey of ennui creeps up my spine to my brain!

Oh, what a rich bed that is for soulful thoughts of the ‘oh poor me!’ variety.  One of my recurring miseries is that I have no real close friends. I do have close friends, and this thought is most ungrateful.  I have dear Camino friends, past work friends, then neighbourhood friends – though so many of these friends seem to live in British Columbia, the next-door province!

My early years in Canada, I felt and appreciated wonderful close friends. We are still friends, but I moved away, some have died. I was younger, and life was an adventure.

 I do have Edmonton friends, but come February, I can tell myself another story.

Just the other day, I read a Facebook book post about the paradox of friendship, this is how I understood this theory:   for true bonding in friendship, there needs to be the good and the not-good time. For friendships to bond, you need the gritty times to make a friendship glue.  If it is only good times, that is a too much of a slippery surface!

But I am Lady Sunshine, I believe in gratitude. An optimist on the outside, why would I burden my friends with my Sturm und Drang, my sadness and sorrow?   I had lunch this past week with a friend, yes, a real sweet close friend, and I was so busy recounting woes (which I had to work at a bit!) that I did not ask about her, and it turns out she had a real and valid weight on her heart.

Sigh, life is a work in progress, whatever your age, especially for me, apparently.