Way back when I was at City Hall a thousand or so years ago, the entire group of Legislative Aides to City Council Members spent much of the winter planning our Good God, It’s Only February and I Can’t Stand It Anymore weekend.
We’d start planning and organizing minutes after Christmas was over, figuring out elaborate plans and locations, who was going to bring what to where and when. Meetings, gatherings, walking the halls, typing or handwriting and copying memos. A lot of work went into our weekend. We deliberately picked one of the last weekends in February for our outing.
We always ended up at the cabins at Shawnee State Park in Portsmouth, a beautiful drive east along the Ohio River. There were several cabins, spouses and significant others were welcome (as well as several reporters at various times), those good cooks among us volunteered to shop and cook, as long as the rest of us agreed to serve and clean up. This rule about good cooks was set up after the first disastrous year, when a not good at all cook took charge of the cayenne pepper. That spaghetti was inedible.
Wine, lots of political conversation, talking all night, laughing, jokes. Those were the folk I felt closest to in the world at that time – and am still close to those remaining on the planet.
And when the weekend was over – so, pretty much, was February. Spring was right around the corner. We had lived through another one. Hooray!