By COREY J. HOLMES

The tree limbs are bare and still, dull and empty of life except for the occasional crow or sparrow wintering over. The sky is heavy and gray, rain plops steadily, innundating the already saturated earth. The grass is long, bent over and sodden. All is slow, plodding, waiting for spring and the rush of passion and bursting buds, waiting for the right moment when all of that pent-up energy bursts forth. The sap is beginning to boil in the trees, everything's taking a good long drink and getting a craving for fresh green things.

When everything is cold and damp outside, I want to be inside, in the warm kitchen, cooking. Winter makes me Hungry.

Lately, I have been associating food with just about everything I can think of: I was just reading the morning paper the other day and having a lovely cinnamon bun and a pot of tea ... You know, that organic soil mix from Sky Nursery would be nice in the garden bed and it grows great tomatoes ... I was changing the oil in my truck the other day and it reminded me of those steel cut oats you can get with fresh cream down in Seaside...

It's a winter thing. The body wants to hole up and get fat, the mind follows. We all sit around and read books to one another, eating cookies and drinking something hot. Let's go to the nocturnal house at the Zoo and eat mangoes in honor of the fruit bats. Why get a dinky little tin of anchovies when this pint jar is only 15 bucks? Hey, they keep forever, not that they'll last three months.

And with all of this thinking about food comes the reading about food, which in turn leads me to think about cooking food, and thus buying food to cook. Add to that two small children in the house growing like, well, small children, and a Male Domestic Counterpart (MDC) with a major appetite brought on by SAD (Seasonal Apathy and Despondency) and it's hard to think about anything else. One of the kids is always in a different food stage than the other: the three-year-old wants nothing but eggs -- fried, boiled or poached -- and the one-year-old will only eat off my plate, be it Greek olives, fried red peppers, or garlic-saturated mashed potatoes. MDC eats anything I cook.

I make some lovely bread full of the right proteins and carbohydrates, crusty and flavorful, and they won't eat it. The big one doesn't like the brown spots, wheat germ, and the little one now thinks bread is boring and polenta is more her style, the more "stinky cheese" the better. MDC eats the whole loaf in one sitting with a stick of butter.

But this is what I do. I signed on to be a Mama-at-home and by god, I'm going to do it in spades. My hands and arms are getting strong from all that kneading. My brain is getting a workout from trying to think of something to tempt my brood every four hours and, if you asked me, I would say this is the only thing I want to be doing -- feathering the nest and getting strong from that moment that everything bursts forth.

Corey J. Holmes was raised and is raising her own kids north of the bridges.