18. What Do You Eat in January?
“January brings the snow... ,” began the well- thumbed, illustrated chil-
dren’s book about the seasons that my children cleaved to as gospel, while
growing up in a place where January did nothing of the kind. Our sunny
Arizona winters might bring a rim of ice on the birdbath at dawn, but by
midafternoon it would likely be warm enough to throw open the school
bus windows. Tucson households are systematically emptied of all sweat-
shirts and jackets in January, as kids wear them out the door in the morn-
ing and forget all about them by noon, piling up derelict sweatshirt
mountains in the classroom corners.
Nevertheless, in every winter of the world, Arizona schoolchildren fold
and snip paper snowflakes to tape around the blackboard. In October
they cut out orange paper leaves, and tulips in spring, just as colonial
American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about
British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent)
squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of
becoming more real than the stuff at hand.
Now, at our farm, when the fully predicted snow fell from the sky, or
the leaves changed, or tulips popped out of the ground, we felt a shock of
thrill. For the kids it seemed like living in storybook land; for Steven and
me it was a more normal return to childhood, the old days, the way things
ought to be. If we remembered the snow being deeper, the walks to school
