Everyone Agrees That March Weather in Boston Is Confusing

Photo by KJGarbutt/Flickr

Here in Boston, we can’t be blamed for having mixed feelings about the month of March. It contains the official start of spring, and yet almost always dashes our hopes for the end of the cold-weather season. No wonder, then, that throughout history, locals have found increasingly blunt ways to say the same thing: Is winter gone yet?

“The king could shut up the harbor, and keep out the ships; but he hasn’t the might to drive cold weather from Boston in the month of March!” — James Fenimore Cooper, Lionel Lincoln, 1825.

“On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

“You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re on month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.” — Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” 1934.

“For all its grim visage, March in Boston is the season of hope, or at least it is supposed to be.” — John Mitchell, The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston, 2008.

“By March, Boston is officially sick of winter.” — Mara Vorhees, Lonely Planet: Boston, 2009.