I don’t know if it is a proverb exactly, but a saying that I’ve heard most of my life is “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.” I used to think that the saying was reversible and could also be stated, “March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion.” The point of the reversible saying was that it was a bit predictive. If the weather is mild at the beginning of March it will be wild at the end and if it is wild at the beginning it will be mild at the end. Later, when I was older, I discovered that the saying might not have been based on the weather at all, but rather on the constellations in the northern hemisphere. March begins with the constellation Leo (the lion) rising in the east and ends with Ares (the ram or the lamb) setting in the west.

The places where I have lived have all been places where the weather in March is quite variable. It can be bright and sunny one day and cold and blustery another day. In the Dakotas, where we lived for a total of 32 years, March can be a month of heavy snowfall. There were many years when March saw the greatest snowfall of the year. But there were also years when March saw less snowfall and the true spring blizzards might come as late as April or even May.

March was, in my experience, a month that could seduce you into a feeling of spring fever and then blast you with a foot or more of snow. In those places, spring was often a time of wild weather shifts.

It is a bit different here where we live. Although we haven’t lived here long enough to have internalized the weather patterns, March is really a transitional month in this place. In Rapid City, where we used to live, the Farmer’s Almanac suggests that planting be timed to account for the possibility of frost any time up to the end of May. Memorial Day is seen as the weekend to set out tomatoes and other vulnerable garden plants. Here, the almanac suggests that most years it is frost free by the middle of March. The Ides of March (March 15) is seen as a good time to set out vulnerable crops. That’s two and a half months earlier than was the case in South Dakota.

Still, we can get some cold weather around here. The last week or so, temperatures have been ranging from the thirties to the fifties. We have had a fair bit of wind. But the weather element that is hardest for me to get used to is the humidity. Humidities range in the eighties and even higher many days. When the humidity is above 75%, 50 degrees doesn’t feel all that warm to me.

I remember the rule in my childhood home. If it is below 50 degrees, you have to wear a jacket when you leave the house. If it is above 50 degrees, you can leave your jacket behind. I’ve always been a person who doesn’t have trouble keeping warm, so I followed that rule for most of my life. But it doesn’t work for me these days. I suppose it can be the product of age, but I hate to admit that, so I blame the humidity. Whatever the reason, I’m most likely to be wearing a jacket anytime the temperature is below 60 around here.

As a result, I’m not sure whether March is entering like a lion or a lamb around here. I guess I’ll go with lion this year simply because it is so windy right now. Wind, of course, is often associated with March. It is supposed to be good kite flying weather. I’ve loved kites for as long as I can remember. When I was growing up, we made all kinds of kites. It was really windy in my home town and one year when I was a teenager, we made a large tetrahedron kite about six feet on each side. the sticks were hardwood dowels and they were covered with cotton stretched by applying airplane dope. The kite flew fairly well, although we had a hard time finding string that was strong enough to hold it. We attempted with a variety of different string types, starting with binder twine, which broke and eventually finding some light nylon rope that worked fairly well. The next problem was that I didn’t weigh enough to hold down the kite. I tried employing my brothers to hold it with me, but they complained about the rope burns from the line and they wouldn’t respond to my orders to hold tight and to play out line fast enough for my liking. Eventually, I rigged out a way to wrap the line around the bumper of a car as a partial anchor. I imagined that it might be possible for the kite to lift me and wondered if I could use it to fly by towing it behind a car, but it really wasn’t reliable enough for that venture. I guess it was that kind of thinking that led to parasailing.

Later, especially during the years when we lived in Boise, Idaho, I got into flying multi-line kites. The Oregon coast was a great place for kite flying and we made fairly regular trips there during those years. Our conference office was in Portland and I had a sister who lived in that city, so it seemed natural when we headed that direction to keep going and spend a little time at the coast. As a result I expected that our home here would offer a great place to fly kites. And it is a pretty good for that activity. But our bay’s prevailing winds are onshore rather than the offshore winds that are common in Oregon. That means that our beach is not a very good place to fly kites at high tide because they will be swept into the power lines and other obstacles next to the beach.

So I’m not going to make any predictions for how March will go this year. I know that the fact that it is March already is a bit of a surprise to me. Time seems to speed up as I age, a phenomenon that has been reported to me by many friends. Perhaps the best part is that I know March is capable of surprising me and I still enjoy surprises.