No doubt about it. For the Kansas City area, March came in like a LION. A rather agitated lion, at that. And, of course, keeping up the long and fine tradition of weather-folks using as many tired and unsurprising turns-of-phrase as possible, I said just that on FirstNews, this morning. If the saying holds true, then we should have a quiet finish to the month. On the other hand, sometimes March stays kind of lion-esque for the whole 31 days. (Now I've engaged in another long-standing tradition of weather-people by equivocating...staying nicely on the fence...giving myself plenty of leeway. An entire course at weather-person school is devoted to how to do this kind of "maybe this...maybe that" stuff. I got an "A.") In Wisconsin, March seems to hang on forever. Cold. Damp. Gray. Garrison Keillor once said that God created March so that people who don't drink will know what a hangover is like.

Years ago, I did a story about the origin of that "In like a lion, out like a lamb" adage. I wanted to go back and look at it again for this bloggolio but discovered that the TV station has transferred all my old feature stories to highly flammable film and then stored them near the furnace. I do remember that in that particular story, I used our little Dachshund-Chihuahua mix, Jingles. Although Jingles has long since gone to that giant fire hydrant in the sky, I still have folks mention him every now and then. Anyway, for the story, my talented wife, Jessica, used cardboard to create a lion's mane and a lamb's woolly head to slip onto Jingles' noggin as a visual aid. You could see the loathing and embarrassment in the dog's eyes. For many nights after that, I would wake up to find Jingles staring at me and muttering. I'm just lucky he couldn't reach the silverware drawer. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't figure out some way to get to the sharp objects. Once he had worked his way up onto the kitchen table and ate his weight in Easter ham before we discovered him.

If I remember correctly, I found a reference to March and lions and lambs in Shakespeare and other information indicating it has to do with the constellations in the sky as the month starts and ends. The real saying has March coming in like a lion because, still being winter, it is usually cold and nasty, and going out like a lamb, because spring has arrived and it should be sunny and warmer. We tend to turn it topsy-turvy and say coming in one way results in going out another. Over the years, if we have a snowy beginning I've said "March is coming in like a polar bear." Clever, huh? I also like to use animals like aardvarks and platypussessesses or platypi...not to be confuse with "plate of pie," which sounds pretty good about now. A couple days ago I said the first day of March would be cool and soggy...like Fonzie in a bathtub. That has turned out to be partially true but it is actually coming in more like a weather guy: Windy and All Wet!