THE JANUARY HOUSE
The January House is my home, named, so I’m told, for being the first house in the village – or the last, I say, depending on how you look at it, but either way one whose name predisposes me to have a fondness for a month others tend unfairly to malign. I have lived here for a year now. I have challenged local standards of decency by painting the outside seaside yellow, instead of misery grey, and the gate and front door deep blue instead of carbolic green. I have painted and polished and planted for three hundred and sixty-five days. I am a local outrage and I am exhausted, but I am happy.
I have done all this and here I am, lying right here in this bed just where I was lying three hundred and sixty-five days ago. Right in this exact soft spot – give or take perhaps a few centimetres, which I’d say are neither here nor there in an entire orbit of the sun. Here I am, making my mark in the universe, leaving a kind of snow angel in time and space − not as splashy as a supernova maybe, but less terminal. You do your thing, star, and I’ll do mine.
I don’t get the whole thing about looking at the universe and feeling insignificant. How big are you supposed to be before you count? Who, honestly, would not look at the universe and think, ‘ Wow, I exist! I am part of this and there’s nothing and no one quite like me!’?
Hmmmm, well, well, well.
I can’t help wondering if I was this comfortable a year ago. Possibly. Possibly not. I daresay this glorious moment of utter harmony with all things bed and bedding will pass, absolute bliss never lasting as long as it should. Inevitably my nose will begin to itch unbearably. Until then I can enjoy the absolute pleasure of every detail of lying here.
Ok. Time to abandon this me-shaped bit of the universe and get up, I suppose, bliss having slipped away somehow. So what’s out there today?
Nothing.
Well, no, not nothing. January is out there − and in here, too − extolling living quietly for a while, saying no to constant activity and giving me a head start on accepting the consolations of bright cushions and the seep of spicescented steam billowing from a warm kitchen, spiking the pleasure of blankets and lights by hitting me with frosts and early twilights and the vast midwinter dark while I think of what comes next.
And now I have something else to consider. A gift. Yesterday evening I passed by a stall in the market where a man with a face like winter − hawk nosed and grey eyed − was selling glass globes that fluttered down snow or autumn leaves or flurries of petals and transparent sequins shining like iridescent rain.
“I have one for you, January Woman” he called and, as if he’d expected it, when I turned back he pulled a globe from his pocket and offered it for my inspection: a tiny replica of the village, with my house, seaside yellow and blue.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“I get about,” he said. “Are you staying?”
“Forever,” I told him. “This is just the beginning.”
“You’ll want this then,” he said, “to remind you to surprise people from time to time, since I hear you’ve been forgiven.”
And now, experimentally, I turn the globe over in my hand and outside feather flakes of snow begin to fall and settle in the lane.
Felicity Marsh lives in Warwickshire inventing recipes, gardening, reading and learning to accept that she has no discernible talent for housework. Her short story If I Had Only One Story to Read appears in Same Same But Different (Everything With Words).