TIME MARCHES ON

Tooling toward home around 7 tonight, the clouds put on a show. Earlier today, it was rainy and gloomy. Yesterday Indy weather people reported half a foot of snow is expected for Friday into Saturday but today, they have backed off that big time. That's March for you.

Of all the months, March is the one with the most mood swings.

Here in Indiana, the third month brings every kind of weather. There will be days with sunshine, blue skies, white clouds, and even summer-like temperatures. Those, however, may well be followed by a snowstorm. Tornadoes will carry warnings or watches, an ice storm may cripple trees and power wires. It will rain.

And that’s only day one.

Well, two, maybe.

If it’s been a particularly rough winter, which it hasn't been this year, March is that thing you point to, as in, “Once we get to March, it will turn around.”

I spent winter 1986 sick with morning sickness, although time of day had nothing to do with the constant nausea and overall exhaustion. The cold and dreariness offered no relief. I thought it would never end.

Then the calendar flipped to March and it was as though a light had flipped too. It was a Saturday on that first day of March. I went to Lafayette where I had lunch at Long John Silver’s and went shopping. As I ate fish, and gazed out at the bright day, I at last felt … good! I wasn’t sick, wasn’t tired, and I wanted to hug the month.

Little could I have imagined this: The baby girl that would marry the baby boy I carried would be born the next day.

In the years our boys were growing up, March meant baseball. In fact, baseball was a major part of our lives for nearly two decades, counting both boys’ years of participation. I associate March with delight that it was finally time, and weather good enough, for the boys to get out there and practice. Each new season meant new teammates and dynamics as well as new uniforms and new parents with whom to share bleacher time.

Baseball, and by association March, had a scent, a chilly, earthy, leathery scent. It had a sound. It was the snap of ball in glove, of crack of the aluminum bat against ball. March had an energy of hope for the season ahead. It was time to play ball, or at least practice it, and I couldn’t imagine it ending someday and being a baseball mom without boys and a team or two to follow.

Perspective is everything. Now I wonder how I found the time to get anything done besides baseball because boy, there was a lot of baseball. Now I wonder how I would ever fit baseball into my life. Yes, perspective.

Spring breaks always came in March and for a few, too few years, we had some fun times: Disney World, Busch Gardens, Historic Williamsburg, Virginia, Cleveland where we saw the Cavs play and visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Football Hall of Fame in Canton.

There was the spring break we spent on college visits to Bloomington, Hanover, Terre Haute and Evansville, only for Sam to visit Muncie later and say that’s it, search over. He would be a Cardinal.

Along with daughter-in-law Allison’s March birthday, it's also son Ben’s.

March, for decades, meant time for my biggest work project of the year, the annual Courier-Times recipe contest. Then interest waned and we moved on to other projects.

I appreciate March most these days because we get to spring forward on Sunday. Say what you will about former Gov. Mitch Daniels but if I saw him I might give him a high five for Daylight Savings Time. I like it.

I also like March because once April arrives, I’m counting on spring, no more playing around, and I'll watch daily as green replaces brown landscape and sandals top newly bare feet.

What do you like or dislike about March? How do you feel about springing forward?
March, you are a fickle month, you devil. But you aren’t January and you aren’t February. And for those reasons, I welcome you with open, if sweater-clad, arms.

Purple clouds with hot- pink trim. Oh, March, you are full of all kinds of weather and sky scapes.