March Ahoy

Well, after a few fits and starts, mostly mine, March is well and truly upon us. It's a so-so month, enthusiastically speaking. Sometimes we get winter through March, but usually (and by saying this I'm dooming us to something completely different) March just slides by in the mud. Not that I'm complaining, because I live on a hill and if I didn't, I'd probably get washed away.

I'm not completely sure why March would be named after Mars, Roman god of war. It might be celestial. All I can say is that March is a lousy time to make war. It's not fun to march through mud either. Perhaps it's more a reference to the onerous march of time, slogging through this muddy month on its way to somewhere more pleasant.

If Julius Caesar had listened to the soothsayer, we would all be much more comfortable with the Ides of March. As it is, I'm not sure that anyone really knows when the Ides are. I know I don't without looking it up. It's not something we tend to celebrate, largely, I suppose, because the Christians didn't co-opt it to be their own festival. Maybe St. Patrick's Day is really the Ides of March. I doubt it, since as I recall the Ides are on the 15th. But what with the Gregorian/Julian switch and the new Gregorian switch later on, it's hard to tell.

It isn't spring yet, and I'll tell you why: I haven't purchased a bag of sunflower seeds for my car yet. When the weather gets warm enough to drive around with the windows rolled down I like to amuse myself by eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells out the window as I drive. That, to me, is the end of winter (and, I suppose, the uglier parts of spring, since I can't drive around with the windows down when it's raining).