March always shows up with a reputation. People like to sort it into neat categories: lion, lamb, or something in between. Up here, it rarely bothers choosing. It just cycles through all four of its personalities in order: slush, ice, mud, and betrayal.
The saying itself has been around for centuries. It appears in English writing in the 1600s, including John Ray’s 1670 proverb collection. Almanacs kept repeating it until it stuck. Folklorists point to the sky for backup. Leo, as the lion rising in early March, and Aries as the lamb setting toward the end.
Even the Ides of March get their say this month. The Romans treated the fifteenth as a day to watch your back, which feels about right for a month that can turn on you between breakfast and lunch.
There are whole books of March proverbs, most of them polite ways of saying the month can’t be trusted, such as the old “March many weathers,” or the farmers’ warning that “a dry March means a wet April,” or the hopeful British line about “a peck of March dust” being worth a king’s ransom.
People have been trying to predict this month for centuries, and most of their efforts boil down to the same conclusion we reach every year: March does whatever it wants.
And this year, Duluth meteorologists aren’t promising anything tidy. In their early‑March forecast discussions, the National Weather Service laid out the month the way we actually live it: fog, low clouds, a stalled front, unseasonably warm air aloft, and a spring system bringing rain, thunder, a wintry mix, and a whole lot of snow. Then another system early next week. More rain, more snow, more everything. We even touched the 50s this month, one of those brief, suspicious warm spells that make you think spring might actually mean it this time.
That’s March. On paper, it looks like a gentle slide toward spring. In real life, it’s a month that can’t decide what mood it’s in. One day, you’re chipping ice off the steps. The next, you’re ankle‑deep in mud. Then the sky remembers it has unfinished business and drops a fresh round of snow just to keep everyone humble.
So is the proverb true?
Sometimes. March comes in like whatever it wants, leaves the same way, and spends the middle proving it has teeth. The rest of us just keep our boots by the door and try not to take any of it personally.
