Ides?

Today’s forecast: Beware.

A look out the window could tell you that. This rain is Arkian now. But appropriate for a day to be spent inside, no going out for a chicken Caesar, and if you ate one, you might as well have et two. Know what I’m saying? It’s brutal out there.

Ides of March. Those ancient bad days persist somehow. Even if we don’t know what it is, it’s the can with a slight dent, the potato with a funny-looking eye. Why buy trouble?

Never mind that every month has an Ides, and that it just meant the middle of the month in the Julian calendar, from iduare (“to divide”). It’s the hand-me-down word. What do we do with it? It sounds plural, like whatever it is is ganging up on us. It sounds like “eyes.” Beware the eyes of March. Yeah, I can see that. They’re set too close together, like the i’s in “criminal.”

We were trusting March a week ago. Temperature in the fifties. Sunny. Ushering it to the best table. Frog-marching winter out the restaurant door like a diner who’d overstayed his welcome. That was our mistake. It was really the prince, incognito. The March we’d trusted was the fickle one. Winter was just being winter.

Beware getting too deep into metaphors.

Anyway, it’s going to be nice tomorrow, which is not the Ides of March, but the beginning of the second half of March, the part that’s an anagram for Charm, with that new hour of daylight we just bought shown to its full advantage, and winter, what can I say? You rule. For four more days.