The February Playlist
Recently a friend commented, “January was simultaneously the longest and the shortest month I have ever experienced.” How profound, I thought, and how accurate. It seemed to take most of the month to find a groove. The fact that January had 31 days was almost a point of reassurance; maybe with a just little more time we could sort out this disconcerting 5/4 time signature we’re living in and straighten up our routines into a familiar shape.
You know what doesn’t have 31 days? February.
Perhaps that forecasts what is ahead of us in 2026—time will both race by and stand still all at once. Hang onto your hats, friends: the spring winds are already here.
The 2026 February Playlist. Here’s where I find myself these days: Listening, teaching, reading, writing…the practice verbs of my life and hours.
Unseasonably warm and windy. The forsythia is in full bloom all over town and daffodils have started appearing in the flowerbeds in the neighborhood. There are new red leaves on my rose bushes. Yikes! It may be February, but spring is peeking her head out. Apparently she did not get the word about the groundhog seeing his shadow.
Teaching: Forgot musical goals, drilling key signatures or teaching melodic minor scales; this month in the studio we are mostly fascinated by the strange and curious sport of curling. “It doesn’t seem to require any talent,” said one student yesterday. “I mean, I think we could all do it.” “Did a grandma invent curling?” asked another kid. “What’s with the brooms?” I don’t know. What I do know is that the curling announcers use ridiculously aggressive language to describe the slow action on the ice—“Huge opportunity!” “Massive strike!” “Another runaway success!” The rhetoric is both awesome and rather alarming.
This whole scene isn’t as musically lost as it seems. The Winter Olympics provide all sorts of ideas for student improvisations and compositions, as has Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day, our other February holidays. (I ignore President’s Day much in the same way I try to ignore the current president.) I gave only a small nod to the Super Bowl as evidenced by the fact that I accidentally scheduled the monthly high school studio class during the half-time show. Oops.
Around here we may not understand the rules of curling (there are brooms, a stone and a house. So far sounds like an average Wednesday of housecleaning around here), but I do want to teach this message: Pay attention. The world is a curious place.
Listening: In late January, Matt and I celebrated 21 years in this little house. Our time here is drinking age, appropriately so, as both of us have both matured considerably between these walls. “Adulting” is what we call it when we face another plumbing problem, the sketchy old boiler, the new roof. So much adulting.
We had a posse of folks that helped us move that January day in 2005—folks from Matt’s choir at church, musical colleagues and friends—who cheerfully loaded chairs, set up the bed and plugged in lamps, carried boxes of books and piled them on the floors and against the walls. At this point in our young nine-year marriage, this was our eighth address, and at 1250 square feet, the biggest space we had ever made home. We had a basement and a garage. A washer and dryer. A brand-new refrigerator. A garden. So many bowls.
That night, after everyone left, we ordered a pizza and put on a favorite recording—Painting from Memory: Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach. We opened a bottle of wine and toasted our first—and forever!—house, innocent to all the adulting ahead of us.
For Valentine’s Day this year we found ourselves recreating the scene: the pizza, the soundtrack, the bottle of wine. Only the boxes were missing. We still have a lot of bowls. And plumbing problems.
Gardening: For several years now, I have practiced the ecologically-friendly habit of leaving the fallen leaves on the ground all winter and delaying the pruning until early spring. I let the birds have at the overgrown Russian sage and the dried yarrow blooms. I ignore the messy dead iris leaves and the spent brown hollyhock stalks self-seeding everywhere. “Lazy gardening,” I call it.
Lazy days are over. My weekly house chores this month alternate between preparing taxes and getting outside in the garden. After months of harvesting salad greens and kale from the pots outside my kitchen door, I have started a new round of seeds. Last weekend I cut back the wild and rambunctious vinca vines from under the rose bushes. Soon that enthusiastic groundcover will sprout sweet periwinkle blooms, signaling the beginning of another season. I pulled the three monster amaryllis plants out from hibernation in the back of the garage and set them in sunny spots in the courtyard. Last year it gave me 28 brilliant red flowers.
“It’s too early to be gardening,” a voice in my head says. It’s true, and yet, here we are. The seasons blur. Time makes no sense.
Reading: This winter I have found myself rather obsessed with all things Alaska. I think about the profound cold and the dark of that northernmost state this time of year, and what it might mean to spend a season in hibernation. Clearly that trip last summer got under my skin. When we returned home in August I reserved James Michener’s Alaska on my library queue, thinking it would extend my holiday fun. I should insert here that Michener’s books are SAGAS. They quite literally start in the Ice Age, and it is often 300 pages before you even get a character to hang onto. A few years ago before a vacation in Hawaii, I read Michener’s Hawaii and found it absolutely absorbing. If even half of the history was factual, then it was way more than I knew before reading the book.
My Alaska request at the ABQ library remained “Pending” for four months, which I later figured out meant that someone couldn’t get through the thing, gave up and never returned it. But in December I found a used copy in a bookstore. I started the 846 pages a few days before Christmas and for weeks waded my way through the dense narrative, reliving scenes and impressions from our magical time there last summer.
Then one day a few weeks ago I took my morning coffee back to bed to finish the last 20 pages. I got to the last paragraph and the sentence trailed off in mid-air. My copy was defective. The book was actually LONGER than 846 pages, and I didn’t have the ending.
Long saga short: In order to read the end, I had to get the electronic version downloaded to Matt’s Kindle. In the process, I had to learn to use a Kindle, which Matt would tell you was a whole megillah. I am still unclear how many total pages the saga had, because Kindle reference points are confusing (95% complete...97% complete…), but suffice to say: more than 846 pages.
It was worth it. And even after all that, I am still rather obsessed with Alaska.
Writing (from No Finish in Sight September 2021):
I live in a world where nothing is ever “finished.” The garden is never done, never completely weeded or watered, pruned or planted. There is always more music to be learned for the next performance, a stack of recordings I should listen to, a pile of teaching repertoire that needs to be played through. I always have a backlist of topics I want to explore on paper. The house is never totally cleaned, just moderately sorted out from time to time. A pile of books is always waiting to be read; the next meal always needs to be cooked; there are always new skills to teach. Nothing is ever “finished.”
But that is the practice, after all. There is something sacred about the repetition itself, the meaning in the doing. “It is when we most feel like we don’t need to practice that we have the chance to really deepen our work,” a friend and yoga teacher once told me. In other words, just when we feel like we are “finished” do we have the chance of really beginning.
…
There is something to be said for the ordinary routines of our lives, the practices that we stay loyal to, day in and day out, far from any finish line or end goal. “The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit,” said Nelson Henderson. I will never finish learning to play the piano to my satisfaction, or finish learning to be a wiser and more compassionate teacher and human being. I will never write the perfect paragraph or give a flawless performance. I will never be so brilliant at a workshop that I never need to give another one. There will always be an unfinished needlepoint project waiting by my chair. My garden will always have weeds, spent blooms, wilting leaves. Life here is so not finished.
Rehearsing: The March Quintessence concert includes a spectacularly beautiful piece by Alex Berko called Sacred Place. It is a six-movement work, scored for chorus and piano trio, that follows the form of a Jewish service but uses prose and poetry by wise writers and environmental thinkers like Wendell Berry and John Muir. The theme is the responsibility we have in caring for the world. The earth says have a place, be what that place requires…The earth says where you live wear the kind of color that your life is... Listening, I think that’s what the earth says…(William Stafford)
Listening and rehearsing and writing and reading and caring for the world around me—this musical work includes all my late winter practice verbs at once. Wear the kind of color that your life is. February is a pale blue winter sky. Listen. The world is a deeply curious place. Sweep your floors, and even your ice. We are so not finished.