Life in the Kingdom | An Ode to March
Plans and memories merge when winter slides into spring.
By Ben Hewitt|Mar 01 2023|
Life in the Kingdom | An Ode to March
Photo Credit: Illustration by Tom HaugomatIn March, the sun creeps higher every day, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, as if trying to keep its aspirations a secret. I like March. I like it for the aspiring sun, for the added light at the edges of each day, another subversive accumulation, the slow pushing back of the heavy darkness we’ve been carrying all these months. You never realize how heavy until you feel it lifting.
I like March for the feeling of anticipation it carries on its warming breezes, the scent of urgency in the air, reminding me to finish those tasks that are best accomplished atop the cover of snow: skidding the final cord of firewood I’ve procrastinated cutting for the winter to come, delivering bucket-loads of compost to the soft ground near the pond while the ground is still frozen and the tractor won’t leave ruts, skiing each of my favorite loops at least once more, and then, if I’m lucky, once more again.
I like it for town meeting, which in our town means that perhaps there will be two dozen of us gathered on the first Tuesday in March to decide business that’s of little import beyond the boundaries of this small place we call home. Who will be zoning administrator since Eric resigned? (Spoiler alert: It’s me.) Have we put aside enough money for a new road grader, and do we really need one anyhow? Should we hire someone to paint the town hall this summer or put it off another year? For the past two years, we’ve pushed town meeting to May, so we can gather outdoors to allow whatever contagion might be lurking to dissipate harmlessly into the spring air, and while I understand the reasoning behind it, I’ve missed that first-Tuesday tradition, which comes at exactly the point in winter when my spirits most benefit from being reminded of the possibility that people can govern cooperatively from across the spectrum of beliefs and affiliations. It’s a radical idea, I know, but it’s true.
I like March because of maple sugaring, and even though we don’t do much sugaring these days, what with the boys only ever home for fleeting periods between whatever adventure they’ve lined up next, I still like to see the trucks heavy with sap tanks, the steam billowing from sugarhouse vents, the occasional line of buckets hung on roadside maples. Not many people hang buckets anymore—plastic tubing is more efficient, and can be connected to vacuum in order to wring out every last drop of sap—and even fewer use the old-style galvanized buckets, which are rumored to contain leaded solder and have thus been deemed a health hazard by someone who knows more about these things than me. All I know is that the newfangled aluminum buckets and plastic bags look to me like props from a low-budget sci-fi movie based in rural Vermont in the year 2106, by which time someone who knows more about these things than me will have likely determined they contain some dangerous compound or another.
I like March because when I awake in the night, I can smell the change of season through the open window above our bed. We sleep with that window in varying degrees of openness all year round, from a slender crack on the coldest January nights, to flung wide in the heat of summer. In March, it’s generally in the six-to-eight-inch range, enough that when the wind is blowing, I can feel it brush across my face.
I like March because March precedes April, and because April—capricious and changeable and altogether unpredictable as it can be—is a month when everything seems possible and some things actually are. Seems possible: Build a sauna! Plant 200 blueberries! Fence the knoll pasture! Finish siding the back wall of the house even though I’ve made the same promise for the past seven years running and haven’t done a thing about it yet! Actually possible: Plant the peas. Stack a bit less than half the remaining firewood. Clean the basement. Staple another layer of tar paper over the much-deteriorated, seven-year-old tar paper on the back wall. Next year, I’ll get those last few bundles of clapboards installed for sure.
April comes, and the weather turns (or it doesn’t—that’s the thing about April, you never really know), and Penny and I plant those peas, though fewer than last year, when we’d already planted fewer than the year before that. Indeed, we’ll plant fewer of everything, except for maybe those little Sungold tomatoes I can’t get enough of no matter how abundant the crop. Every summer, for the past four years, the garden has shrunk just a bit, a diminishing that’s inversely proportional to the amount of time the boys are home. I think about when they were young—truly young, not just adult-young, as they are now—and they each tended their own garden bed, albeit in the loosest, most generous definition of tended. Still, they planted carrots in haphazard rows, and peas they insisted on harvesting before they’d fully ripened, and sweet corn that was often eaten uncooked, the raw, gnawed cobs dropped to the very ground from which they emerged. The boys painted wooden signs proclaiming ownership over the space they’d been allocated, and stuck them into the soil in a way that made it seem as if even those signs had grown from seed.
And I guess that’s why I like March most of all: For me, it’s a reminder of the constancy of change, that nothing stays the way it is for long. Snow melts, sun rises, ground thaws, sap runs, leaves unfurl. Boys grow, then grow some more, then move on. You’d think that by now, more than five decades in, I’d have figured out that everything is in transition always. You’d think that by now, I’d remember that it’s merely my own inability (or unwillingness) to pay close enough attention that allows me to believe otherwise.
You’d think that by now, it wouldn’t be such a surprise to walk outdoors one warm, late-April morning and see those emergent peas. But it is.
This column was originally published in the March/April 2023 issue of Yankee.
