Dryads and Fauns of March

I don't know what March is like where you live, but around here it's very changeable. I remember one year when spring seemed to start at the end of February, so that early March brought warm breezes and blossoms; another year (possibly the very next one) we had a winter storm warning and blizzard conditions in the middle of the month. Sometimes, you're wearing short sleeves on St. Patrick's Day, but that may not prevent you from seeing snow flurries when it's almost April.

Last year, it seemed to take spring a long time to get here. I'd go out for walks, and it would be bright and sunny but rather cold. March seemed to go on forever in a not-quite-winter-not-quite-spring limbo, with a few breaks here and there. It seemed to me that the buds and flowers were later than usual, though I might have imagined that.

In my mind, despite the knowledge that March is predictably unpredictable, there is an archetypal March day. I have actually experienced these, often enough that they have come to sum up the entire month for me, though I think such days are relatively few and even absent altogether sometimes (I don't remember one last year, for example). It's a day that, out of nowhere almost, is suddenly mild and even slightly balmy. Winter seems to have disappeared into nothingness. The air is still and a bit damp, and you can smell the earth. It may be sunny, or it may be cloudy, but the main thing is the returning warmth that you haven't felt for months. You may have heard birds all winter, but suddenly their singing is sweeter and more eloquent and cuts through the stillness like crystal.

So far, I haven't experienced a day quite like that this year. We began the month with a snowstorm that left things looking more like January than March, except that the quality of the sunlight, when I went walking the next day, was too mellow for winter. Earlier this week, we had temperatures in the low 70s on a day that had people driving around town with their car tops down, windows open, and radios turned up. It was undeniably a beautiful spring afternoon but more emphatic than the type of day I'm talking about, which appears without fanfare as more of a subtle awakening.

As a child in Florida, I learned about the four seasons as something that occurred elsewhere, though we pretended they applied to us, too, just to be good sports. We dutifully colored autumn leaves, as first-graders, with our thick Crayolas, imagined winter wonderland at Christmas (though we might be wearing shorts), and celebrated the return of spring with pastels and Easter eggs almost as enthusiastically as if we'd been snowed in. At that time, in the simple shorthand of seasonal images, a March day would have been signified by wind blowing an umbrella sideways.

In that, at least, today was typical. It was quite windy when I went out for my walk in the late afternoon; I took a light jacket. There was a hazy sort of sunshine that was neither here nor there. Although it was a mild day, it had more of an end of winter than beginning of spring feel to it; it lacked the raw earthiness that signals true change, and there was little, if any, greenery in evidence.

If I were to imagine a presiding deity for today, it would be a minor goddess somewhat like the image I saw in the mirror when I got home, with hair completely askew. I hadn't realized it was quite that windy, but my hair said otherwise. It looked like a coiffure a headbanger's stylist would spend hours trying to achieve with mousse and special combs; the lift was unbelievable. Yes, that might be the proper divinity for today, a sort of dryad with long, wild hair and streaming drapery who causes the wind to blow by shaking the branches of her favorite tree.

With any luck, she'll soon be superseded by the divinities of damp earth and still air, who announce their presence gently, with a scattering of tufted grass and daffodils, the loamy smell of dirt, and a lilting quality to the birdsong that turns their notes into something nearly liquid.