McDowell: February Can Always Fool You

RT-D Editor’s note: For 32 years, syndicated Times-Dispatch columnist Charles McDowell (1926-2010) deplored the dreary, endless month of February. The following column is reprinted from Feb. 7, 1993.

February can always fool you

By Charles McDowell

Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November;

All the rest have thirty-one,

Except February, which can always fool you.

Here we are seven days and two departed U.S. attorney-general-designates into February, but, all in all, the month has not begun to live up to its reputation for being cold and cranky, depressing and slower than a month of Mondays.

There was a time when the poem above ended: “Except February, which is endless.” After publishing it that way for 20 years or so, I began to notice in the late 1980s that February was changing. Or, for those who know February well, maybe just pretending to change to throw everyone off guard.

Anyway, the average February temperatures in the Middle-Atlantic region were warming. The characteristic snow, sleet, rain, freezing rain, freezing fog, floods, muds and refrozen drizzles were less extreme, less infernally imaginative in their sequences than I remembered.

In February 1989, walking through a park near the White House, I saw a man taking the sun while propped against a statue of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The man had removed his shirt. Being a journalist, I stepped into a telephone booth as soon as I saw him, called the Weather Bureau and learned that the temperature was 72 degrees at that moment, 2 p.m., Feb. 1, 1989.

In consultation with meteorologists, I have kept careful notes ever since. The daily high and low temperatures in Washington for February 1990 averaged 8 degrees above normal. In Richmond, that February was the warmest since records had been kept. The next year, 1991, February temperatures in the region averaged 7 degrees above normal. The trend continued in 1992, and I got up the nerve to write about the possibility, at least, that something fundamental was going on with February:

Indeed, it is time to say it: February seems to be changing. Yes, changing! Perhaps changing for the worse — a more deceitful February hiding its terrible effects. But conceivably it is changing for the better, or the warmer, anyway.

Now, in the first 48 hours of February 1993, the temperature ranged from 51 to 27, and the wind-chill went down to minus 17. Then came some sunny days, a chill, some bluster, even a forecast of snow. February was reminiscing. But even the bluster was relatively bland. And the long-range forecast was milder and sunny.

I am willing to accept the experts' notion that February is milder because of the “greenhouse effect” — natural and man-made gases trapping solar heat in the Earth's atmosphere, creating global warming. Other experts denounce the very idea of global warming, of course, and for all I know their indignation warms up February.

In any case, we need to remember how it was, how its weather affected our psyches, how our spirits surely are still conditioned by the month itself. I keep the poem (the original from the old Washington Daily News) pinned to the calendar as a reminder of February's pretense to brevity:

“Not that anyone would be fooled by February once he or she got used to the pace and mood of it. It is longer than the War of the Austrian Succession and less exhilarating than the flu . . . February is not merely boring but baleful . . . This month can congeal the mind as well as the nasal passages. And it warps time.

“The only thing February can be depended upon to do quickly is to repeal hope. When it provides a glimmer of sunshine, it might be just a trick, an exercise in irony, stage lighting for the entrance of furies undreamed of.”

So let us be wary as always but brave enough to try to be hopeful.

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