January 2016 is rivers out of the sky, appearing as a billion sparkling drops falling amid the leaning structures of downtown Eureka, where in the trash-ridden gutters they sluice together to flood the corners and soak my mismatched argyles.

January is prune toes and cold feet.

It’s Martin Slough flooded up to the horse’s knees, while egrets and geese consider the bounty nature affords in its best moments, such as these. It’s kids busting puddles in red rubber boots, dogs not wanting to go outside, road crews shoveling mud the old fashioned way.

It’s hash lab explosions, growers forced by a rising bottom line and declining profits to extract the pure stuff from duff they’d rather throw away. It’s drug deals observed behind WalMart, bullies ransacking the Devil’s Playground, and smiling beggars waving warped cardboard signs and hoping a joke works better than mercy.

It’s shots fired, blood geysering up and off the gurney while doctors do their best to save a stupid man’s life. It’s killers sentenced to a long life staring at cinder blocks, and inmates grumbling about what’s on TV when they can’t hear it anyway.

January is my 40th year.

It’s holiday hangovers, strapped bank accounts and overdue notices. It’s a looming tax season, a time of day-late-dollar-short beatitudes and seasonal affective disorder. It’s when days get longer but not enough so you’d notice.

It’s wet car seats when the window stays down, frost in the shadows for days at a time.

It’s cloud caravans, huge sheets of white followed by knuckle puffs trickling passed the power plant. It’s natural cumulus pantomimes the kids help identify: a dolphin, a fish, Santa’s sleigh, a corn cob pipe, a Pacman ghost, a cotton candy Rorschach test everyone can pass.

It’s drizzling funerals, and birthing pains. Eulogies half-heartedly received, umbrellas shaken by the door. It’s sad season at Silvercrest when no one comes to visit.

It’s surging suicides and an overdose explosion. It’s crowds cheering new pot rules and wishing words were enough to fix Eureka’s homeless problem. It’s mill closures — isn’t it always? — and a rumble in the jail.

It’s a self-righteous magistrate greasing his own greedy palms, while the county expands its dungeon for the so-called real criminals. It’s the cold shiver you get when you realize he won’t have to bend over and cough like you did, don the orange fruit suit like you did, cry into the septic telephone like you did. When you realize he too was apparently a criminal.

January is a Great Gray Owl who cultivates a posse of camouflaged paparazzi while his cousin Stellar Jay pitches a new, life-on-the-streets reality show.

It’s also a parade of happy vagabonds and their broken bus, sandbags on demand, earthquakes to keep our martinis shaken.

It’s more people washed off rocks, despite the annual avalanche of PSAs and signs out the yazoo, the history books full with names of people dead or wounded by the crushing weight of water and bone on stone; whole families doused and dead in seconds for a quick glimpse of primordial power.

It’s college cops shooting themselves.

It’s cancer treatments working for family members, kudos for the grandchildren. It’s first words, and Stratego in the half-light of a winter evening.

It’s cuddles and bed clothes, hot coffee and burnt taste buds.

It’s a renewal and a decline, an upstart in the face of your unhung calendar,

Mostly it’s rain again, and more rain. It’s so much rain we remember what it’s like to live in the Pacific Northwest. It’s rivers at flood stage, trees falling on cars, power lines down, and sinkholes gobbling up whole sections of highway.

Yet, it’s also rainbows.

Pretty ones, and fat ones, short ones and vague ones, shooting out the jail and up through the bay, bursting through a canopy of trees and forming just for you in the cobwebbed corner of your messy backyard.

It’s that sweet progression of color, light quietly divided while never falling apart. It’s a deep sleep, a long recollection, a goodbye never delivered, a party never thrown. It’s a whole mess of things to a whole mess of people. But, like the rest of creation, it’s mostly what we make it.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com.