Well do I remember the lead to an Associated Press feature story written about my Down East community years ago by a journalist and friend from New York:

“It’s high winter. The sky is as blue as a baby’s eyes. The chill factor lower than a lobster trap.”

What beautiful and accurate words to describe January, a month some folks around here curse but I tend to relish.

After the momentum approaching and surrounding the holiday season, I welcome the lull January brings with its quiet snows and early sunsets, its frozen ground and naked birch trees. It’s my time for reflection and relaxation, even for solitude when possible.

It’s the month I can spend listless hours watching chickadees and nuthatches darting from the cedars to the feeders. The shells of sunflower seeds crust the layer of thin snow out back, while in front, an industrious squirrel races across the glass panels in the sunroom, back and forth to the dilapidated feeder like a hamster on a treadmill. I look up from a book and watch him until I’m dizzy from his scurrying.

The dooryard is an ice rink, splotched with ashes from the wood stove to prevent our slipping on the way to the garage. On clear, cold nights in January, I often stand out there stargazing, hopeful for a light show unique to these parts. The silence is broken only by the cracks and snaps of brittle spruce limbs or, if the breeze is southwesterly, by the sound of waves against the rocky shore.

January days are quiet as well, except for the occasional whine of a chainsaw up the road where woodcutters are creating a field in the midst of a forest. The noon whistle echoes from across town, the blare slicing through the crisp air. Neighborhood dogs that usually howl at the siren are inside, asleep by the fire.

It’s exactly what I imagined as a child reading Edmund Spenser’s “The Fairie Queen.”

“Lastly came winter, clothed in all frieze, chattering his teeth for cold that did him chill, whilst on his hoary beard his breath did freeze, and the dull drops, that from his purpled bill as from a limbeck did adown distill.”

Others may write about the bleakness of midwinter, the gray, the dismal, the bitter chill. But I love it, all of it, from the snowstorms to the icicles, from pink dawns to black nights. I love the whited air and the snowflakes whipping around outside lights like fireflies. I love the wind that forces me inside and the afghans I crawl under. I love the animal tracks in the woods and the serenity offered in the stillness.

After all the hullabaloo of the holidays, January invites a needed rest.

For each year by now, I rather resemble a plate of pralines left over from Christmas.

Cooked to a softball stage. Beaten to a dull sheen, according to the recipe.