March is an untrustworthy month – you can count on nothing, except the rudeness of the clocks springing forward as we grieve our hour of sleep and shuffle through the halls of an amputated day. The apple tree is not reliable, nor is the greening of the grass. Even the shoots from the crocus are uncertain. Just when the air softens and you feel like your tennis shoes belong in the world again, you get an icy wakeup call and have to reenlist the boots. Just when the t-shirt forces you to confront your arm flab, you’re allowed to slip back into the long and sweatered sleeves of denial.
March kicks off a season of trickery, and can be appallingly inappropriate. You can be woken and told that your father died in the night. You can have a miscarriage, lose a job, read the news, and sit inside your stunned and wintered heart staring out a chirping window, watching bikes come out and play. Easter-purple hops brightly across the grimy snow. Down jackets rub elbows with wispy lemon scarves. Sun sinks into your skin but your bones are full of ice.
You think it’s here, and then it’s not. You believe it’s arrived, and then it’s gone. What you’ve known to be true melts, and before the world is righted again you find you are standing in some bunny-colored slip of a skirt in the middle of lumberjacked day stunned by how wrong you can be.
Some wear layers, but you can’t prepare for shit like this without losing something essential. Kids laugh while others drown; there aren’t enough layers in the world to make that right. The experience of being in this incongruous day is hard. But as time shortens, light arrives. The true call of March is standing in the both and the all. The true call of March is always here.
Starting Close 