The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

A friend was telling me this week how much she loved March because each day held the promise of spring. I told her I did not like March at all because it always seemed to have more winter than spring and that the March winds are always some of the worst in the year.

The day after my talking with her, I experienced those terrible winds in Big Sandy where coming out of the east, there must have been gusts of more than 40mph.

Many is the cabin on Clear Creek that I spent nights in March when I thought the roof was going to blow right off. That never happened but I still think it could easily have happened.

I have to laugh when I think of those winds. For several years we used the old log Bear Paw School for a cabin. It was on upper Clear Creek where Henderson Creek met Clear Creek. In the high winds, a few more shingles would blow off the roof and it got so we could actually see stars when looking up at the inside of the roof from our beds. And yet the pitch of that roof was so steep that it the roof never did leak one drop on the cabin floor or us in our beds! Go figure that one.

Last night I was thinking about March while writing this story and something sort of changed my mind.

March is the month for the geese to come back, flying low over the stubble fields. It is not uncommon to see hundreds in one field and there has never been any more beautiful sight than that on the Montana prairie.

And in the mountains, March is the time when millions of tiny yellow buttercups come out and just after them the pasque flowers or crocuses as we call them locally are out in abundance. They are a wonderful purple flower. It is said that their pedals were used by old time mothers to make a dye to dye Easter eggs around this time of year.

I love them because they will come up right through a snow bank. Just beautiful to see!

And this is the time for us to start seeing a robin or two in our back yards and to start to hear meadowlarks singing on the prairies of the Old Dry.

Here again is a reference to long ago when prairie kids used to kill gophers and trade their tails in for three cents at their local court house. For me the meadowlark’s song is always saying, “Gophers Three Cents a Tail!”

I don’t know, gentle readers, maybe I am just getting more mellow, but by the time I went to sleep, March was looking just positively grand in every aspect!