March, what a month! One day it can be warm and balmy, and an arctic blizzard can be blowing the next! It seems like we always get our heaviest snows in February or March, but it warms quickly and we are left with a muddy mess.

It is not one of my favorite months; but it does have its appeal because, under all that snow and mud, little green things are beginning to stir and poke their heads up above the ground. There are buds on the trees and the air just has a different feel to it. It even smells different. If you haven’t noticed, go outside sometime and take a whiff! Maybe it’s all in my head, but I can smell spring! Winter is losing its grip and will soon be history.

I remember one very snowy March when I was probably 10 or 12 years old. School let out early and I got off the bus with my niece and nephew at my sister’s house. It was snowing so hard you could barely see, and she called us to a window to look out and there were flock after flock of geese, flying so low we could have almost touched them. I guess they had been headed back north and got caught in the blizzard. There were some big minnow ponds east of our house then, Sitton’s minnow ponds, I believe, and we think they were headed there to wait out the storm. I know I saw some snow geese and some Canadas, but not sure what the others were. They were making a pretty big racket. It was an amazing sight.

That is the time my mom got stuck where she worked as the director of the Gravette Nursing Home, and I stayed a few days with my sister. Mom finally got her car to the dirt road and left it there. Daddy picked her up on the tractor and brought her home! I know that was a cold ride, but cars just weren’t going anywhere on those roads.

It had stayed cold for quite a time and the snow on the roads was packed solid. This made them very slick but was a wonderful opportunity for us kids to have some fun. We didn’t own anything as fancy as a sled back then but, I tell you what, a waxed cardboard box works just as well when conditions are right! Just past my sister’s house, the road made a pretty sharp drop and we broke our boxes down until they were flat, hopped on and took off.

We had a blast! So much so, that quite a few years later, when we had another deep snow and hard freeze, I remembered the box thing. There were several inches of snow on the ground, topped off by a layer of frozen rain, so footing was treacherous. My kids were teens by this time and were having a great time “sledding” down our driveway. My daughter was a bit fearful, however, and was sitting on her cardboard at the top of the hill trying to get up her courage to launch. It was a pretty big hill, after all. She wasn’t even at the driveway yet, just sitting where there were still trees, when all of a sudden, her “sled” lurched a foot or so downhill all by itself, then stopped, but we both knew what was coming. She looked up at me with huge terrified eyes, then before I could grab her, bye-bye, she was gone down the hill, screaming at the top of her lungs, with the dog slipping and sliding right behind her! I was afraid she was going to hit a tree and, to tell the truth, I don’t know how she avoided doing just that; but she did and, as her “sled” shot out into the pasture at the bottom of the hill, she fell off the cardboard. The dog thought she had done it all just for him and tried to lick her to death. It frightened us pretty badly, but after it was over, we both had a good laugh.

Anyway, after the ride down, the hard part was getting back up the hill. My oldest son found an old pair of work boots and pounded some screws through the bottom. It worked great for us, but not for him, because he had to pull everyone back to the top.

And if I remember correctly, the power was out. So, when we went back inside, we made hot cocoa in the fireplace. Nothing better than sitting by the fire, warming up from a day spent outside playing in the cold, feeling the burn in your nose and toes and fingers!

I have some other March memories that go back a little bit farther. When I was very little, we didn’t own a clothes dryer so we had to hang out the clothes no matter how cold it was. I remember standing under the clothesline one cold spring day, handing clothes to my grandma when a flock of geese flew over, again pretty low and making a lot of noise.

I had never seen this before, and it scared me until grandma explained to me that the geese had been on a long vacation down south by the sea and were heading back home. She said they were just complaining a bit because the weather up this direction was still pretty chilly. Well that made me feel better, because I thought it was still pretty chilly, too.

Anyway, some days when we gathered in the clothes, they were frozen stiff, and we had to spread them around the house over chairs and stuff so they could thaw out and dry the rest of the way.

Oh, and by the way, they had been washed in an old wringer-type washing machine that wasn’t even in the house. It was in an unheated shed in the yard. On days like that today, I am really lovin’ my modern conveniences. We just don’t realize how difficult life was, even a generation ago. Hooray for washers and dryers inside the house!

Well, happy March everyone, and take some time to go outside and look for the daffodils and hyacinths that are starting to poke their pretty little heads up out of the ground. Some are even blooming. And breathe in that good spring air! Won’t be long and we will be wishing for cooler weather.

And don’t stop remembering!

Tamela Weeks is a local freelance writer. She may be reached by email at tamela. [email protected]