_March_ _Restless Days_ Dormant vegetation is supposed to start awakening when the average mean temperature rises to 43 degrees, normally occurring in the northeast between April 1 and 15. Under unusually mild conditions, with the average minimum temperature lingering for some length of time above 32 degrees, growth begins sooner. This is of course a generality, a law of likelihood, which may be applied to an indefinite number of conditions. Spring may be spring, and winter winter, but March is a part of both February and April. During the warm days in February, the buds of the Mayflower or trailing arbutus begin to swell, while the skunk cabbage is steadily pushing up through frozen, marshy ground. Life does not recur after death so much as show its readiness; but in March the first obvious bursts of change begin to show, like those mountainous clouds coming up out of the west, with a fresh warm wind. The huge clouds roll loose and fan upwards in the gold afternoon. Then the wind changes. A blowing, whispering snow comes out of the southeast, cruel to promise, blotting out the swelling buds, the feeling of release in the air, as if to say promise is nothing without what is not promised. Nothing is realized without the possibility of disaster. “Ahh!” the indrawn breath of a storm, a swirling and seething to make life hide. The snow hisses incessantly into every corner and crevice. High-rolling, roaring tides push in. The storm rises to a mountainous capacity. The sea is fulsomely moaning, running under a white darkness. Comber after comber curls over, spills and plunges down, pounding the sands. The wind seems to pause. It races violently as if to have another try at climactical energy. Then hail clicks down, spattering tree trunks and ground. The snow is turning to cold rain. We are getting “dirty weather.” I feel a load of anger and disgust in me that rivals the storm. I am, to some degree, a subject of these changing days. I come out of a kind of hibernation of my own that might not be connected with the actual state of the weather, but it has its parallels. It is so with my own temper. I hold it for fear of being overwild, and then some outer wildness, a change of air, an adjustment to open sunlight, brings me to a free delight, a sense of opportunity that I thought was gone.