March, The Cruelest Month

On the morning when we “spring ahead” by adjusting our clocks forward one hour and implement Daily Savings Time, we’re dealing with snow and 30-degree temperatures in Columbus. Is spring truly ahead? The buses and cars rolling down the street are snow-topped, the asphalt has a cold, snowy shimmer, and the promise of an early spring has been dashed by this dusting of the white stuff. What’s more, the forecast is for dreary, cold temperatures for the next 10 days.

I disagree with T.S. Eliot: in the Midwest, March, not April, is the cruelest month. Whether it comes in like a lamb or a lion, March invariably teases us with warm days where the promise of spring is definitely in the air, then crushes our hopes with cold temperatures, cold winds, and snow. March is the month with the most unpredictable weather, and it comes at the precise time when we most want to put winter behind us and enjoy the delights of spring.

Here’s the beginning of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Substitute March for April, and it remains apt:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Lion/Lamb

My grandmother used to say that the month of March would come “in like a lamb and out like a lion” or, alternatively, come “in like a lion and out like a lamb.”

The idea was that you could predict the end of March — unpredictable, blustery, weird, perverse March — by looking at the weather at the beginning of the month.  If it was cold and dismal when the calendar page turned to March, you could count on a nice end to the month; but if it was warm and pleasant on March 1, March was certain to jump up and bite you in the behind with some crappy, cold, snowy, “oh-no-will-spring-never-get here?” weather come March 31.

This March 1 morning it was a very brisk 22 degrees, with a stiff breeze driving down the wind chill even lower, when I took Betty for a walk.  I’d say by any measure that means that March has come in like a roaring lion, and we can look forward to some warm, meek, lamb-like spring weather in a few weeks.

The lamb/lion issue raises the issue of your choice.  After the traditionally dismal, gray month of February, would you rather get a respite from the gloomy chill with a brief period of warm weather come March 1, knowing that you will inevitably be hammered with some more cold weather in the near future, or would you rather batten down the hatches, deal with the ongoing cold on March 1, and feel warmed by the prospect that spring will be here to stay in short order?

Me, I’m a lion/lamb kind of person, rather than a lamb/lion type.  Of course, that’s assuming that my grandmother was right in her saying.  I feel confident that that is so, because grandmothers are never wrong.

In Like A Lion



They say March comes in like a lamb or a lion.  In Columbus today, where more snow is falling, we’ve drawn the fierce and roaring lion.  The snowfall is making the riotous jumble of lawn furniture in our back yard look like a bad effort at modern art sculpture.

They say that March goes out the opposite way it came in.  If so, that would be fine with us.  It seems like this winter has lasted forever, and as far as we are concerned the lamb-like weather can’t get here soon enough.

Lamb, Or Lion?

It’s March — the most unpredictable weather month of the year.

We’re all familiar with the old saying about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, or vice versa.  But, which is it?  Sometimes the answer is not so clear.

Last night we had a discussion about whether, in central Ohio, March was coming in like a lion or a lamb.  The temperature was at freezing levels, with snowflakes blowing down.  I took the position that March had come in like a lion.  The alternative view was that 32 degrees and a little snow wasn’t that bad, and that you could only invoke the lion if the weather was abysmal — temperatures in the teens, raging blizzards, and so forth.  That seems like an awfully high leonine standard to me.  It’s just a lion, after all, not Godzilla or Darth Vader.

So, I’m going with the lion.  If March had come in like a lamb, it seems to me, there’d be kids on the seats of the teeter-totter at the neighborhood playground, not swirling snowflakes.