Mother's Moods.

I’ve long regarded March as being probably the most treacherous month of the year. February usually tries to fool us with a false spring, but we’re not fooled. We all know that it’s too early yet and that winter will snap at our heels again before too long.

March is different. In March the colour is coming back in the garden and on the roadside verges. We’re suddenly festooned with daffodils and crocuses, hyacinths and primroses, the yellow bloom of forsythia in the garden and the white finery of blackthorn at the margin of wood and field. The hedgerows are beginning to show the beginnings of their return to a proper greenness, and even the haughty roses are displaying the first hints of red leaf growth. The days are growing noticeably longer and the sun feels reassuringly warm when it chooses to show itself. And all this changes the mindset from one resigned to the cold and dark of winter to one with hope of light and comfort and wholesome fecundity. In short, we begin to believe that spring has arrived at last.

In such circumstances it’s easy to forget that Mother Nature is given to mood swings, during some of which she shows scant regard for the wellbeing and contentedness of her offspring. And so the temperature falls again, and the wind grows and growls its way to gale force. The snow falls to cover the world in wintry whiteness, hiding the resurgent green and denying the birds and animals access to food. The daffodils shiver in discomfort and some of them give up the fight and lie prone and dispirited, hoping, it seems, for better luck next year. The hyacinths lean away from the blast, apparently trying to run before it while being cruelly trapped in the cold earth. And the crocuses and primroses lie drowning beneath a mantle of the horrid white stuff that is the bane of man and beast alike.

At least that’s how it looks to a nature boy like me who needs the power of vibrant earth energies to stay afloat in an all too imperfect world. We had a modest snowfall a couple of nights ago, and then the gale began to growl, deepening the depression that’s already settled in my chest and is squeezing it with little effort at remission.

People tell me I’m too sensitive, and I tell them that such a notion is irrational. I am what I am; Mother Nature made me this way and so she can’t complain if I scowl at her now and then.

(And yes, I do appreciate the fact that I don’t live in a part of the world where they have tsunamis, catastrophic mud slides, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and permafrost. But if Tennyson can wax eloquent about inclement weather conditions [in a stormy east wind straining, the pale yellow woods were waning, the broad stream in his banks complaining, heavily the low sky raining over tower’d Camelot] why I shouldn’t I do so prosaically? It’s all a matter of awareness, observation and relative perception.)