I have just turned my new “Baby Moo Moos” calendar, a Christmas gift, over to March and will enjoy looking at a photo of an adorable newborn calf for the month. It seemed odd to have a short week the end of February. I didn’t notice until I was paying bills.

Each year I remember the month of March for Saint Patrick’s Day, Easter (some years), a change to Daylight Saving Time, and a preview of spring — with an emphasis on “preview”. But more than that, I remember the weather most, not so much when I was growing up, but mostly when Lyle and I and the boys lived at Severance.

At Severance, the weather usually turned warm in March — at least for awhile. The snow on the lawn in our yard melted so we were able to rake dead grass and leaves. We prepared the garden space too and even planted a few garden seeds and sweet peas. From past experience we knew that there was more storm to come, especially around the equinox.

In those years that we lived at Severance I taught at the high school in Eaton, a few miles away. Our spring break usually fell pretty close to the equinox and so did the regional science fair. I knew that we were likely to get a big snowstorm during or shortly after the spring break vacation.

My biology students were just finishing the written papers and posters for their science project displays so I suggested that they carry everything home with them just in case we didn’t get right back to school after vacation.

Sure enough — amazingly — the snowstorm almost always materialized, and it was a big deal. When I first moved to the eastern slope of Colorado from Moffat County, I was amazed what the wind could do with an inch of snow. It blew the snow off the farm fields and onto the middle of the highways.

That’s what it did even in March, and the snow was so wet and heavy that it couldn’t be tackled with a car, and the highways were closed until they could be plowed. It was a big deal, indeed.

When I was a kid we didn’t have a spring break — just a couple of days off at Easter instead — so I can’t remember an equinox storm. Besides that, we had lots of snow always.

However, when our family moved back to Moffat County I can recall big storms in March, and sometimes the snow had melted off the pastures where we kept cows, granted that these locations were at lower elevations compared to my childhood ranch. I also remember heavy snow during April and May.

Who knows about this year?