The Hunger

I awake with a gnawing feeling, an insistent primal urge that won't be quieted. My toes slip from satiny sheets into chilly air, onto the cold carpet, into a pair of thick socks, down the hall to the bathroom, the toothbrush, then a flight of stairs, and I'm at the stove, yearning for butter. Yes, the luxurious splendor of butter searing the bottom of a pepper-specked organic egg in my perfectly seasoned No. 10-1/2 cast iron pan, butter melting on a thick slice of ciabatta toast, butter pooling sweetly into its lacy holes. Oh, and why not a few toothsome pieces of applewood bacon or a savory sausage patty from the farm down the road or maybe a Smoky Link?

Yes, so good.

I am now ready to face another day.

Here in farm country, where I am not a farmer but I have been eating like one, this great big breakfast has been my pattern since mid-November, when the Lake Effect snow started falling and never stopped. What, 100 inches so far? I'm eating for 10 people, eating to feel warm, to feel comfort, to feel safe, to feel right.

Yet, believe me, I know better. I can almost hear my arteries clogging from all that sat fat. It's just that this particular winter is a relentless, suffocating blanket that has turned my eaves into icicles and ice dams, roads into skating rinks, meaningful travel into a dream. I don't even want to venture outside.

Staring out from my dining room table at the hilly, frosted tundra, I'm witnessing a black squirrel dragging an entire block of suet from its hanger to the side of the deck, and a chorus line of chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, finches, pine siskins, woodpeckers, mourning doves, in that order, pecking at thistle and sunflower seeds, taking needed sustenance, bearing up in the 2-degree day, yet rejoicing at the rarity of this sunny day. And out beyond the little lake I live on, behind a thin wall of sleet, there's a rainbow. A sleet-bow.

For that, I can rejoice. Here at the end of January, even though the Weather Channel has shown the identical seven-day forecast graphics of snow, week after tedious week, day after day, for two solid months, I have to believe that's a sign that spring just might come early this year.

And that this strange breakfast-eating disorder will cease before my arteries actually do snap, crackle and (gulp) pop.