IT'S SPRING.
Or at least, it's supposed to be.
Purple-headed crocus have already broken through the ground. Robins hop in the front yard. And Easter has thrown its pastel party and gone.
It's spring. But the chilly weather isn't playing along.
It's spring. Still, while daylight savings time leaves the air a delicate orange-pink well into the evening, this color isn't warming up the freezing dawns.
More light is making the days grow longer and younger. But brooding sky-watchers have not yet packed up their shovels and ice-melting salt.
It's spring. But tyrannical March still reigns, advancing its chilling army of 31 days, slyly flashing warm afternoons only to replace them with yapping snow squalls. March is the too-long month of slog and delay, of impatiently waiting for a lighter jacket and a lighter heart.
In his poem, "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot put the blame on April, calling it the cruelest month:
". . . breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."
But frankly, New England should be so lucky. Here, it is the mercilessly long season of spring colds and overcoats.
The local rain only stirs up mud and weariness. The month's precipitation so far is about an inch and a quarter more than normal, says the suspiciously neutral National Weather Service. And even cheerful meteorologists speak elliptically of "partly sunny" days and weather that's "disorganized."
But the truth is more plainly put: March is indifferent to human hopes for warmer days and warmer lives.
Even the poet got it wrong. April isn't the cruelest month. It's just the cure for sodden March.
