March is a confounding whipsaw, but rich for writers

It's March, and spring is in the air. For a moment, anyway. As quickly as hints of change arrive, just as quickly come reminders that say: Not yet.

A few days ago, the blessed sun thawed us as the mercury soared near 70 degrees. A few days from now, temperatures in the 20s are predicted.

March is a whipsaw. March is mercurial. March is a month of transience and uncertainty. There simply is no more confounding month.

There are years, many years, when I would swear March is longer than 31 days. In the worst years, it never seems to end.

In March, they say, spring arrives, which sometimes you really have to take on faith. Like other months, it does have its hard realities, the primary one being that whatever you are experiencing now will soon be gone.

The facts of a season are one thing. Their influence on us is quite another. Ralph Waldo Emerson, as fine an observer as any writer, got at that quite nicely when he wrote, "Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour."

Emerson lived in a cabin for two years, studying nature, several decades before his mentee, Henry David Thoreau of "Walden" fame. Thoreau had his own seasonal analogy: "The first pleasant days of spring come out like a squirrel and go in again."

For centuries, March has been a rich vein for all sorts of poets and writers, from William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer to Ogden Nash and Enid Bagnold. Each of them, in some manner, grappled with its bridge-like nature. Among the more perceptive was Charles Dickens, who must have spent some time on Long Island, writing, "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."

That passage is from "Great Expectations," which is appropriate since March is a month of expectations, and dashed ones. It is teasing and torment in equal measure. You want to hope, you want to embrace optimism, but you are stymied time and again. There is more than a touch of cruelty in the way March bestows a taste of spring, then snatches it back like Lucy with Charlie Brown's football.

Sports parents on Long Island know this well. As March drags on, they gather on the sidelines for their children's baseball and softball games, huddled in parkas, clutching mugs of coffee, knowing that the days might be getting longer but March's restive winds still pack a winter bite, making a mockery of the term "spring sports."

There is a part of me that would like to dispense with March altogether. And for a time, I did. Early in my journalism career, I was a sports reporter and covered college basketball's March Madness for a decade. One of the most enjoyable parts of that experience was that after a month of all-consuming attention to the men's and women's tournaments, day after day and night after night spent in a bubble of packed arenas and stadiums, I would return home in early April to undeniable spring.

Now I have no escape from the vagaries of March, from its gray days and chilling rain to its brilliant blue skies and short sleeves to its stubborn cold and forecasts of snowflakes.

And yet.

To miss March would be to miss the robins and crocuses, to miss the return of sound and color, to miss the building of nests and the pushing of shoots through the thawing ground and the delighted cries of children rediscovering the outdoors. In the end, those are inevitable and worth the wait.

March, above all, is a test of patience, a reminder that change does not happen overnight. Real change, the kind of change worth pining for, takes time. So let us march.

Columnist Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.

By Michael Dobie

michael.dobie1@newsday.commwdobie

Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.