I moved here for a job I thought would be temporary, a two year contract that turned into eleven years without me really deciding it should. Most of what people know about Bloomington, if they know anything at all, is the university, the limestone, maybe the basketball if that’s their thing, which it isn’t mine. What nobody warns you about is February, the specific quality of a college town in the dead middle of winter when half the students have gone home for break and the other half are just gone, sleeping through the gray, and the whole place drops into this quiet that I didn’t expect to love as much as I do.

The library empties out too, obviously, which for most of my colleagues is a slow stretch to dread, less foot traffic, fewer reference questions, more time to think about how many months of winter are actually left. For me it’s the best stretch of the year, honestly, since the periodicals stacks get quiet enough that I can actually hear myself think through a classification problem instead of half-solving it between interruptions. There’s a particular kind of light that comes through the basement windows down there in February, low and flat, and I’ve caught myself just standing in it for a minute longer than the task in front of me strictly required.

Winters here aren’t dramatic the way people from further north seem to expect, no real blizzards most years, just a long gray stretch of cold that settles in around Thanksgiving and doesn’t fully let go until March. I used to hate that, the sheer duration of it, before I figured out that the trick is having something to look forward to inside the season instead of just outside it. Thursday group doesn’t take a winter break. If anything the coldest months are when attendance is best, since nobody’s got anywhere better to be on a Thursday night in February than Denise’s lounge with six chairs and a game nobody’s tired of yet.

My brother Marcus, two hours up the road in Indianapolis, always asks why I don’t just leave, especially in February specifically, when he calls to complain about his own commute through the same weather. I don’t have a great answer beyond the fact that I like a town small enough that I recognize the same three baristas year over year, and big enough that a university library needs someone thinking hard about cross references for a living. Somewhere in between those two facts is why I’m still here, eleven years past the point where I meant to have moved on to something else.

There’s a particular walk I take most February evenings, down past the courthouse square and back along a street with the same handful of porch lights on every night, and I’ve never once run into anyone I know doing it, which used to bother me and now feels like the whole point. Some towns are for being seen in. This one, at least in the dead of winter, is for being left alone in a way that doesn’t feel lonely so much as unhurried.