
March, the haughty month of teasing and temptation, is that one time of year that really messes with my sense of wonder. One day it’s frigid with a sharp north wind, and the next day brings a calm, pure blue sky with sunshine warming everything into life. The ocean remains hostile to the touch, cold and unwelcoming, but the forsythia, crocuses, and daffodils carpet our landscape in their majestic yellows and purples to the delight of our senses. The real mental whirlwind begins when the sunshine stays in place for several days in a row and all of humanity becomes singularly focused on getting a season’s worth of outside activities completed in one weekend. Then, bam, a north wind moves in again, the temperatures plunge, the salt air stings, and the fingers holding those pruning shears go numb. Springtime, Springtime, wherefore art thou, Springtime?!
This is also the season when time seems to begin speeding up. Our to-do lists lengthen, and we busy ourselves going here and there, doing this and that, wondering where all the time has gone by the end of the day. Daylight Savings Time, that outdated relic ritual which I believe should be thrown away, seems to contribute to the speeding up of time. Hooray for us, we have more light in the evening, but at the cost of jarring our circadian rhythms into an unnatural shift which deprives us of the stillness of morning sleep. We don’t gain an hour of light – we simply shift ourselves to one more hour of activity and one less hour of rest.
Foolishness. Spring is upon us, and soon enough the days lengthen by Nature’s own rhythms. Indeed here it is, the season of anticipation and counterpunch.
But you know what? The season is changing, and Old Man Winter, you ain’t gonna win. We’ve enjoyed our time tucked into blankets with our good books, with our cups of peppermint tea, and then our quiet afternoon walks in the woods, but now the Earth awakens and with it our spirits are like those sunny daffodils, reaching upward and tilting against the windmill of winter in a seasonal battle of wills. So it goes with springtime, this juxtaposition of what is versus what will be. Day by day the water warms, the birds sing a little earlier, and the sun shines a little later. That north wind loses its bite and the mercury in the thermostat fails to fall below the freeze line. Our windows open to the warm breeze, and our farmer’s markets begin again with the seasonal greens. Let’s enjoy this time of year, despite its occasional counterpunch of winter, and before the mad rush of summer. Let’s s l o w it all down and just let Nature guide us on our journey ahead.
