If there’s an adjective for March, it is fickle. Sun so warm you finally don’t need a jacket. Nope. There’s the pelting, unforgiving rain driving you back inside to the warm hearth. One day you can enjoy coffee outside, the next, it seems impossible, that it even was possible. The North wind latching on to the back of your neck with claws as it swirls away. Fickle March can’t decide which direction to go. It was sunny, but a minute ago. I swear!

Skies so blue, and then fast moving puffs of precipitation-wielding, sun-erasing clouds. Once a warm blue sky, ten minutes later, back to gray, every shade of gray. Why can’t it just stay blue? Because it’s fickle March, that’s why.

For all of its ever changing Yo-Yo like patterns, it never fails that I can still find some shoots of growth springing forth from the brown ground. Same as it did some 366-ish days ago, the same Virginia Bluebells are anything but fickle. Enticed not so much by temperature as by sheer length of day, they pay little mind to the futurecast snowflakes in the weather pattern. They make their way forward through the North wind and the icy rain, steady and solid. Their deep plum color a far ways away from the bright Kelly green they’ll become in a few short weeks. Tiny wrinkled buds now, tightly closed, it is hard to imagine soon they will be bell-shaped, and big enough to house a hungry bee.

Even though the wind still rattles the windows, the occasional raspy tune of the Red-winged Blackbird is enough to know that the March grip on winter will slip soon enough away and the dainty bells of those Spring flowers, my favorite, the Virginia Bluebell, might finally mean that the winter coats can be hung for good. Fickle, be gone!