Ode to March!
I don't know if March has as many fans as, say, June or September,
but to me it is the most glorious of all months.
For one thing, my birthday comes smack in the middle of it, right on the Ides. (I've always loved that placement . . . right in the middle!)
And it's a day of intensity and drama!
Caesar:
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry "Caesar!" Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry "Caesar!" Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.
Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.
Beware the ides of March.
Caesar:
What man is that?
What man is that?
Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
(Don't expect he was that crazy about March!)
But there are less specifically personal reasons as well. For one thing, March contains every possible form of weather.
"In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours." ~Mark Twain
"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade." ~Charles Dickens
Emotion seem to coincide with the weather patterns and I find myself loving the way my emotional spectrum seems to remain as intense as always, but condense in March, making the days full of a wildly varying play of them. Instead of 10 emotions in a day, I often, in March, find myself experiencing 10 within an hour, (or less!) Not everyone is comfortable with that, but being a March child it delights me!
"Being a March child" brings me to another reason I love March. It is the name of the family in the book that was my first, passionate, literary love! The March family in "Little Women!" I don't know why Louisa May Alcott named them that, but I always took it as a great personal blessing that I was related to them by the name of the month I was born in!
Another reason I'm grateful to March is, Daffodils!
"Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."
- William Shakespeare
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."
- William Shakespeare
March is all things . . . it is the end of winter and contains and releases all that winter was, and as winter was the container for all that was in the year past, March's winds are the element that sweeps it all away and cleans the slate for the birth of a fresh new round of seasons. And March contains, as well, that birth. It contains the threshhold that exists between the seasons and the years as we count them with the seasons. March is Death and Birth and Hope.
"A light exists in Spring
Not present in the year
at any other period
When March is scarcely here."
- Emily Dickinson
Not present in the year
at any other period
When March is scarcely here."
- Emily Dickinson
So concludes my ode to March. (With one or two more favorite quotes!)
"No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow." ~Proverb
"You can't see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it's there. It's the same with spring. You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland." ~Paul Fleischman
Happy Spring!
