Mad as a March hair!
I don’t remember much about March as a little kid except it was close to Easter. It was that time of the year when everything red went away, replaced by pink, yellow and green and maybe a little bit of lavender. Cupids, hearts and roses gave way to baskets, bunnies and flowers.
While pondering something to write about March, it dawned on me that I have a bond with Julius Caesar. Aside from us both being born in July, we share a wariness of March. While the admonition to Caesar to ‘Beware the Ides of March,’ cautioned a deadly outcome for him, my personal soothsayer (my mother) was equally serious. Her annual pronouncement that March ‘comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb,’ was her way of telling me that if I didn’t wear my cap, I’d get sick.
While the lion-lamb reference generally relates to temperature, at my house it was all about the March wind. In fact, March is the windiest month of the year with an average wind speed of 10.9 miles per hour. My mother insisted I wear a cap every day, and every day I resisted. At 7, 8 or 9 years of age, warnings about getting sick didn’t mean anything to me until I actually woke up with a bad case of tonsillitis, but I still hated wearing that cap!
‘Mad as a March hare’ is another phrase you hear about March. It’s an English idiom that refers to the unpredictable and excitable activity of the March breeding season, but at my house ‘hare’ is and was spelled ‘hair.’ Back then I had a cute fuzzy white cap with a few girly sequins on it and my mom would pull it down over my straight, baby-fine hair before I left the house each morning. As a walker, when I got out of her sight, the hat came off but not without a few wild hairs (pardon the pun) sticking out. My disobedience for vanity’s sake usually came with a price because I would get sick and then deny taking the cap off.
If sickness and a bad hair MONTH weren’t enough, it seemed like I was the only girl in my class to wear a cap and that made me a target at recess. Zack Strain, Charles Viereck and a few other boys whose names I can’t remember would pull my cap off and I’d chase them around the playground trying to get it back and end up coughing. Today those poor boys would be suspended for bullying, but I really didn’t mind being chased by, or chasing after Zack - see above reference to unpredictable and excitable activity. Their antics also served as a convenient cover if I did get sick. Afterall, I did wear my cap. Those nasty boys took it off!
I’ve never had hair that was conducive to hats and I used to think that not every woman was cut out for wearing one but decades after those Helms Elementary recess days, I learned that every woman can - as long as she has the right hat. A wide-brimmed Diane Keaton style doesn’t work for my Sally Field height, the Flying Nun aside.
About 16 years ago at the Houston International Quilt Festival I came across a booth of hatters who knew what they were doing when it came to matching women and hats. They did it so successfully, they sold me three! Since then, having accepted my seasoned citizen status and propensity to get sick when it’s windy, I’ve purchased a few knit caps and throw looks to the wind in favor of staying well and healthy. Once in a while I remember to retrieve my hatboxes from the top of my closet to wear one of my three treasures and the response is generally positive.
If there is a point to my March madness, it’s to say that like love, there is a hat for everyone but once you find it, wear it – because it’s March and if you don’t… you’ll get sick!
Connie Clements is a freelance reporter and award-winning columnist. She writes feature news articles on a weekly basis and an opinion column as the mood strikes her.