Slow As Molasses in January

I first encountered that phrase when I read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, as a teenager. What a curious phrase! And what a curious book! I’d discovered the book in an old box– it was a hardcover “Hollywood” edition published in 1940. It had beautiful color pictures from the movie version, all in Technicolor! It was probably a collector’s item, though I didn’t know it. Unfortunately, this favorited book of mine burned in a house fire in the 1980s, along with a vast collection of other books I’d collected (some printed as far back as 1870s).

I loved Gone With the Wind so much that I did my senior high term paper on it, “The Southern Woman Versus the Southern Lady.” It was about what the Southern woman had to do for survival in the Reconstruction days of post-Civil War era. My English teacher had said that in his 35 years of teaching English, I was the first to do a paper on Gone With the Wind, which surprised me.

Getting back to molasses in January, I’m thinking of that particular phrase because that is how I feel today– this glum, frigid day in January. I’m slow, the weather is slow, and New York travel has slowed to an absolute crawl. New York travel is so slow, it’s almost dead. Such is travel in the doldrums of winter. Travel attractions really don’t pick up until Memorial Day, although a few brave ones do begin trickling in around the Ides of March. It’s hard to find places to go in January. Too bad, because January is so dull, anyway: no gardening, no home improvement, no barbeques.

We have to drive out toward Syracuse in a week or two. I’m hoping I can dig up something to visit while we are out that way!