Dayna Patterson
Groundhog Day
It’s Groundhog Day, again, and so: grandmother’s birthday, Candlemas, 2/2, my youngest child’s original due date. She surprised us by arriving a month early, yellowish, as if her skin had been rubbed all over with dandelions. Pink and polleny.
Dent de lion, French for lion’s tooth.
Grundsau, Pennsylvania Dutch for groundhog.
Every year, I watch the movie: Phil Connors, the weatherman, living the same day on repeat, stuck in eternal winter.
Long ago, in Germany, villagers watched for the bear’s emerging. If he stayed out of his hole, they knew it would be an early spring. When bears dwindled, disappeared, they watched badgers instead, prognosticating future sun or snow.
We buried my grandmother on a hot July day. We stood mute beneath a blue canopy—poor substitute for sky, but at least it erased our shadows.
There are many names for groundhog: marmot, thickwood badger, weenusk, moonack, monax.
At Candlemas, villagers would bring their candles to the church to be blessed. Stained glass. Incense. Why do candles need blessing?
Whistle pig, red monk, woodchuck, sifflieux.
Better to bless the bones of newborns, accreting like wicks dipped in wax. Or bless their grandparents’ old bones, melting like overnight candles.
Shadow. No shadow. Qu’il luise ou qu’il luiserne, L’ours rentre en sa caverne.
Woodchuck comes from a Cree Indian word, wuchak, and has nothing to do with wood or chucking.
We named my child after my grandmother, even though she missed February by a mile.
Young groundhogs are called chucklings.
Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.
Every part of the dandelion is edible: flower, stem, leaves, root. Why did we name them after a lion’s tooth and not the golden mane? Crinière de lion.
I learned French in Quebec where winters hyperbolize themselves, so dark and pillowy and deep they invite eternal slumber. I mean splendor. Each tree robed in moonlight. Each house gowned in moonsilk.
Even Solomon in all his glory did not clothe himself like one of these.
I curl up on the couch with my chuckling, watch Phil Connors try to unstick from his time-trap. His story makes me believe in transmutation: vinegar to honey.
Bring your candles, your chucklings. Meet me at Gobbler’s Knob.
Punxatawney Phil became famous after the film, but there are dozens of others.
My grandmother, my child: two candles wounding the dark.
In some towns, stuffed groundhogs are pulled from their hutches to predict the weather, taxidermied specimens who won’t bite.
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?
We rely on them for their chronoception, and they shape our waiting for a new season.
There are many alternative groundhogs: armadillo, chicken, lobster, bass, bullfrog, tortoise. Human in a groundhog suit.
With winter shrinking, do we need to keep asking about early spring? If only we could hogtie time till we became honey versions of ourselves.
Bring your pouch of baby teeth, dried roses from your grandmother’s grave.
What stories do we stitch into our children’s seams? I sew a new time loop with a name as needle.
In French, blesser doesn’t mean to bless.
Maybe lion’s tooth refers not to the flowerface, or the jagged green leaves, but the long white taproot piercing the earth.
Dayna Patterson is the author of Our Lady of Thread (forthcoming, 2027), O Lady, Speak Again (2023), and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (2020), all from Signature Books. She collaborated with Susan Alexander, Luther Allen, Jennifer Bullis, and Bruce Beasley to produce a poetry collection of interwoven poems, A Spiritual Thread (Other Mind Press, 2024). She received the Association for Mormon Letters Poetry Award, and two of her poems appear in Best Spiritual Literature, 2023.