“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, Great Expectations
It certainly is a strange and different month. One year, it snowed every Wednesday in March. We would go to school on Monday and Tuesday each week, and then the snow days began. The snow piled up, and the sledding was fun. Those days of missing school have not been forgotten.
This is the month when we used to buy new kites. Flying them was sometimes a challenge with the still winds on one day and the gusts on another day. A kite could quickly crash, get caught in trees, or be carried away until it was out of sight. These thin, plastic toys were entertaining, but so flimsy.
March Madness and St. Patrick’s Day are just around the corner. Some famous people were born in this month, e.g. President Andrew Jackson, singer James Taylor, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, Albert Einstein, and Dr. Seuss. Women’s History Month claims this month as its own, and daffodils are its flowers. Spring begins on March 20.
In 44 BC, Roman dictator and emperor Julius Caesar was in the midst of a series of political and social reforms when he was assassinated by a group of nobles and friends on the Ides of March. This murder was further immortalized in the tragedy Julius Caesar by English dramatist William Shakespeare. In the play, a soothsayer warns Caesar to “beware the Ides of March.”
March was my grandmother’s favorite month. She lived on a dairy farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and winter weather had its own staying-power there. The blooming daffodils in our yard were usually about three weeks ahead of hers. Lulu would call my mom with the definitive morning when her daffodils opening their sunny blossoms. Sometimes they were covered with snow, but Lulu was ecstatic to see those harbingers of spring.
I am pleased that my daffodils, transplanted from where I grew up, survived. They were planted there under three white dogwood trees. When my folks sold the house, I transplanted some of the bulbs. As they have multiplied, they are now in three beds and not one. These sturdy flowers dance with the winds and smile in the rain
Perhaps we should take lessons from the daffodils and choose dancing and smiling.
Each month in my sixth grade class, our teacher selected a poem for us to memorize. We had to go to the front of the class to recite it. Looking back, I am not sure whether the worst part was the memorization or the standing. As I remember, we all survived the discipline of this recitation.
One of my favorite poems was I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by the English poet, William Wordsworth The first verse is still in my memory bank.
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
“A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, a wind comes off a frozen peak, and you’re two months back in the middle of March.” ― Robert Frost
Sheila Ingle 