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| The Proverbial Lamb and Lion |
What memories do you have from your childhood about March? Were there any foods your mother always made something in that month? Did you celebrate any holidays, family birthdays or other important events? What about the kind of clothes you needed during these 31 days? I feel family stories popping up here.
Try to include many active verbs. Let your reader 'see' what you're writing about. For further triggers to your memories of March, I have included the result of this exercise when I did it several years ago.
Hoping your memories and exercise might produce a brand new piece of writing you can use in a writing project or a stand-alone you can submit to an editor. These exercises are meant as practice but also to aid in coming up with more than the exercise alone.
Musing on March (written about 2014)
By Nancy Julien Kopp
Today in Kansas, March slipped in like a sweet little lamb. She brought clear skies, sunshine and temperature to reach 68 by mid-afternoon. What bliss after one of the worst winters Kansas has had in a long, long time.
Along with all those good things, March winds are going to blow today. They'll whip through the trees, which are still recovering from the devastation of the December ice storm. The wind will roll across the Flint Hills with glee, bending the prairie grasses like pieces of cooked pasta. The wind will skip across rivers, stir up the sand traps on golf courses, create havoc with hairdos and swirl dirt piles when found. It doesn't matter a bit, however, because those south winds bring warm air from the gulf to our state. So, blow wind, blow. Send kites dipping and dancing through the sky.
Our town has a St. Patrick's Day celebration that grows larger every year. A Blarney Breakfast, races for runners and walkers, and plenty of green beer highlight the day in an area near the Kansas State University campus. Irish music blares through loudspeakers, and on that particular Saturday, everybody is Irish! As for me, I'm Irish every day--at least half my heritage is from that green, green land.
This year, we also celebrate Easter in March, a holiday that is both religious and commercial. Whether you celebrate one part of both, it's an important part of the year. For me, Holy Week reigns, and I plan the rest of my activities around church services on Thursday, Friday and Sunday of that week. But I love the commercial part, too, the many decorations and early spring flowers, trees budding, lambs’ births--all those things that tell of rebirth and awakening. But don't all of them stem from the Easter story of the Resurrection? For me, they do.
One more thing March may bring is another snowstorm or possibly another ice storm. Kansas almost always gets snow at least once in this third month of the year. I remember one bad ice storm that frosted trees and shrubs in the middle of March one year, allowing my children to have an extra day of Spring Break. The best part about March snow or ice is that it rarely lasts more than one day.
Welcome, March!
