February

Seattle has two seasons: Rainy, and August, or so the local joke goes. Actually, I'm not sure if that is a local joke, but it should be. It doesn't actually rain here all the time, but it rains a lot of the time, and most of the year it can be overcast for days at at time, or months at a time, so it seems.

But I think the seasons that make more of a difference here are these: Light, and Dark. Sort of like the penguins in Antarctica, only not quite so stark a contrast.

Seattle is pretty far north. It is the northernmost city of its size in the 48 states (and I suppose all 50.) Our capitol, Olympia, is the most northerly capitol of the 48 states, and we are north of that.
Seattle is farther north than Fargo, North Dakota, farther north than Toronto, Canada. The 45th parallel, halfway from the equator to the north pole, runs through Northern Oregon, way south of here.

As a result of all this northness, we have noticeably longer summer days and shorter winter days than, say, California, where I grew up. Around June 21, it starts to get light by 4:30 AM (or so I have heard), and it isn't completely dark at 10:00 at night. However, near Christmas the days are about eight and a half hours long, and the sun never gets very high in the sky. Add in that it is usually overcast and often raining, and the truth is that it's dark almost all the time for several months, starting in November. You get up when it's dark, drive to work in the dark, come home in the dark, and a lot of times it's dark even in the middle of the day.

When the boys were very young, we lived on a cul-de-sac with several other families with small kids. During the summer, the boys would go out and play with the neighbor kids almost every day, and we would chat with their parents all the time. Then a point came each year when everything stopped, because it was dark when we got home, and it was cold and rainy, and we hardly saw each other for months. In the spring, we ventured outdoors again.

I don't think seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is much of a thing in California, but you hear about it here every year. The Internet says it is caused by changes in light rather than by cold weather, and I can believe that. I always find November to be depressing (not clinically depressing -- I'm fine, thanks), because it is like going into a long tunnel, knowing that you won't be seeing the light at the other end for a long time.

And that is why, sometime since I moved to Seattle, I learned to appreciate February. The weather is still crappy -- as I sit here typing, it is midday and grey outside, and raining, very typical -- and it is still dark most of the time, but by now it is getting lighter on the way to work and on the way home. I can see the light at the end of that tunnel, finally, and this is good.