March in the upper latitudes has two faces and it shows them both every year, sometimes in the same week. Early March is still winter. Late March is something else, not quite spring, but not winter anymore in any honest accounting. The shift happens unevenly and never in the same week twice, but it happens, and watching it happen is one of the things I most look forward to in the calendar.

The first face is the one most people picture. Hard snow on the ground from a late storm. Wind out of the north that finds you the second you open the door. The yard back to looking the way it did in January, with the bare branches and the brown grass and the same small flock of juncos working the platform. Daffodils, if you were unwise enough to plant them in a south-facing bed, two inches up and now under three inches of new snow. The general feeling of a season that will not, despite what the calendar says, let go.

March’s First Face: Still Winter

This face is honest. It is the average condition of early March in this region. We get snow in March almost every year. We get below-freezing nights well into the third week. The notion that March is a spring month is a piece of mythology that does not survive contact with the actual weather, and if you live here you learn not to believe it.

And then there is the other face. A morning in the back half of the month when the air comes in mild from the south overnight and the yard, at first light, sounds different. The cardinal song is louder and more frequent. The titmice are calling all over the neighborhood. A red-winged blackbird, freshly arrived, is making his particular noise from the wet patch by the back fence. The grass underfoot, when you step on it, gives a little instead of crunching. Something has turned. The blackbirds are reliable indicators. They do not show up until the wetlands are open enough to support them.

March’s Second Face: A Hint of Spring

The two faces alternate, sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour. I had a Tuesday last week that began at twenty-three degrees with a hard frost and ended at sixty with the windows open. The yard adjusted in both directions. The juncos, which had been on the platform first thing, were gone by midafternoon, having moved off to wherever they go on warm spring days. The robins, which I had not seen on the lawn before that day, were out working the grass by four in the afternoon. The same yard, the same eight hours, two completely different species mixes.

What I have come to think about March is that the value of it lies precisely in the unsettledness. Most of the year the weather and the yard are in some kind of agreement. February is cold and the yard is a winter yard. May is warm and the yard is a summer-bound yard. March is the only month where the two halves of the year are fighting it out in real time, and you can watch the fight happen.

A Few Notes Worth Keeping

I keep a few notes through March now, mostly for my own interest. The date of the first lawn robin. The date of the first red-winged blackbird. The date of the last hard frost, which I cannot really know until it has passed but which I can guess at. The date the daffodils first opened on the south side of the house. The date the maples started to redden up at the buds. None of these are precise. All of them, together, give me a rough map of what the year is doing.

Late March this year was warmer than usual, but punctuated by two cold nights that knocked the early bulbs back. The robins arrived a week late, the blackbirds on time, the maples a few days early. March kept its character even as the dates shifted. The month had its two faces and showed them in the order it always shows them, which is winter first, then a hint, then winter again, then more hint, then on a Tuesday in the last week the door opens and stays open. The number of cold nights left in the forecast keeps shrinking, and the yard is responding to every one of them, in the unfussy way the yard tends to respond to almost everything.