This is a month of slow erosion. It grinds you down a little bit every day. The days are starting to lengthen, but only by a blink or two each morning and evening. It’s so cold that your breath freezes in your beard, and your hands turn red and puffy from the wind biting through the seams in your gloves.
January chafes and rubs at you. It grinds down with icy files, smooths off with dark sandpaper and polishes you raw with salty grit.
I think I wouldn’t mind it so much if there were snow, but it’s been too cold for anything but a pathetic dusting of ice crystals that squeak like styrofoam when you step on them. The drifts of December and November have melted, frozen and evaporated. All that’s left are filthy lumps of grey on the lawns. Even the ice has shriveled down like ancient icecubes half-forgotten in the freezer and smelling of old plastic and poorly wrapped food.
Ugly tufts of frozen lawn and dessicated leaves are exposed where the postman has made his path across my front yard. I have a draft excluder wedged under my front door. Stepping outside and inhaling freezes the insides of my nose and mouth almost instantly, leaving a sharp acid smell and a stabbing pain in my sinuses. If my hair is damp when I leave the house, in seconds I have a solid helmet anchored to my scalp by a thousand pinpricks.