The low moans of the wind through the trees outside my bedroom window woke me, and I listened to the sound of the snapping, slapping and scraping of branches against the roof of my apartment building. From my rumpled bed, I heard the caprice of the wind, knowing that in the morning, I would have to right my blown-down trash can, and wonder if the month of March would come in as if a lion, or a lamb.
My weather memory is blessedly short-termed: unless there was something truly catastrophic, I cannot recall the state of the weather beyond a few days. When I hear people say, “It was 50º last Monday,” I nod in silent assent and complete cluelessness. As I listened to the roar of the lion and felt its breath as it blew trees against the walls of the building, I recalled a morning in St. Louis in 1994; I woke up to the shrill whistle of a murderous-mile-per-hour wind and watched as the drywall bulged from the pressure created by the wind’s passage across a small open window. When I set out to work, I found street lamps blown flat onto the pavement.
Though the Indianapolis area has not been severely blasted by winter, I still long for consistently warm days to take the chill from my daily walks (which are less daily when the days are cold). Someone joked last week that the weekend was going to bring to Indy, all four seasons in one day. That seems to have been the case. I remembered that old “Farmer’s Almanac” prediction about the month of March: If it comes in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb. Or the opposite. In any case, the ending of this week will bring the beginning of March, and either plump up my hopes for warmer weather, or promise to roar again, as March leaves.
When I left the San Joaquin Valley of California to come to live in Southern Indiana, I came back to the kind of weather that I’d experienced regularly, in Pittsburgh. June 1978 still found people in Indiana shuddering and shivering as they recounted their memories of the brutal ’77-’78 winter. But as people dredged up the horrors of the season, I was unaffected: I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, where brutal winters were common. And yes, I told stories of having to walk to school through three feet of snow, following in the tracks of the bigger kids as they broke paths through the streets. And how I never had a snow day. I don’t remember hearing anything about a connection between the Lion, the Lamb and March. We had Punxsutawney Phil, who carried greater weight in other areas of the country than in Pennsylvania. We always assumed that winter would stay until it was gone, a groundhog’s lack of shadow notwithstanding.
Everyone who knows me well, knows that I hate winter; when Paoli Peaks opened in Southern Indiana, an associate asked me to go skiing with him. I asked him why he thought I would do that: “Doesn’t skiing involve snow? And ice? And cold? Why would I do anything that involved that stuff, on purpose?” I did consent to an exploratory effort on what passes for slopes in the state, and I did have fun. Until my hands got cold. It was fireplace and rum, thereafter, and I checked the experience off my bucket list, forever.
If the old Almanac’s predictions about weather prove to be true, I’d rather have the end of this week bringing a lion’s roar, so that we can get the later bleat of the lamb.