The wind that shakes the barley

“In the spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours,” Mark Twain once said. Welcome to springtime in New Mexico, the time to be happy-go-lucky and the kicking up of one’s heels the kind of thing. While the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold, that song from the movie Paint Your Wagon keeps popping into my head:

Away out here they have a name

For rain and wind and fire.

The rain is Tess, the fire’s Joe

And they call the wind Maria.

This month the wind seems to be more Maria-ish than usual, but I probably think that every March anyway. It’s when something that’s supposed to be attached to something else is seen flying down the street. You know, shingles, hats … toupees …

There’s another song that you could say is apropos for this month, this Monday specifically, called “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” by the Dublin-based group The Chieftains, a reel that will find you wanting to spontaneously break into an Irish jig.

As everybody knows, it was supposedly on Mar. 17 that St. Patrick drove all the snakes into the ocean, and wouldn’t you know it, to this day, snakes are still nowhere to be seen on the Emerald Isle. So, let’s go green and party! Green beer, green chile, green tea, you choose.

Not to be outdone, Sunday, Mar. 16, is St. Urho’s Day in Finland, a special day for Finns who are jealous of the Irish for having so much fun on St. Patrick’s Day. According to legend, St. Urho chased all the grasshoppers out of Finland and saved the grapes.

But wait, there’s more. Over in the city of Rome, Italy, this Saturday there’s a different sort of celebration going on, where every year on the Ides of March, costumed reenactors don togas and commemorate, with much pomp and circumstance, the last day of Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar. It’s followed, appropriately enough, by a production of Shakespeare’s play.

I’m thinking that no matter how screwy things can get in our nation’s capital, check out the dysfunction between Caesar and the Roman Senate. The Senate, which held the real power in that Roman Republic, had given Julius the honorary title of “Dictator in Perpetuity,” but when he took the titular honor all too seriously, Brutus and Cassius and other senators formed a secret cabal called the Liberators. On Mar. 15, 44 BCE, they impeached, err, stabbed, Julius right in his forum, so to speak. Back then, they had concealed-carry knives under their togas, you see. In the end, however, the assassination triggered a few civil wars and led eventually to the end of the republic.

OK, those were simpler times, but politics never change. It brings to mind the Will Rogers quip, “Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?”

Try as I might, I’m doing my best to avoid thinking about politics and especially the back-and-forth discourses on anti-social media. Consider the observation of the distinguished American philosopher Groucho Marx: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

Meantime, here in the real world we’ll be heading into spring next Thursday. The vernal equinox happens at 3:01 a.m. on Mar. 20 this year, when the Earth’s northern hemisphere starts tilting sunward. The vernal equinox is just a time and space thing. As the poet said once, “Time is just conceptual, movement is perpetual.”

Fun fact: The vernal equinox can be used to figure out when Easter is. Just remember that it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.

Or you can look at the calendar.

But I digress.

What about the above-mentioned Maria thing? It turns out that a bestselling novel published in 1941 called “Storm” had a main character named Maria, who, according to the author, George Stewart, was to be pronounced “ma-rye-uh.”

Anyway, because the book was so popular during World War II, meteorologists got the idea, for whatever reason, to unofficially begin naming storms in the Pacific after women, the first being Maria. After the war, the practice became official and applied to Atlantic hurricanes. It wasn’t until 1979, in a bold pre-DEI move, that masculine-type names were added to the mix.

Before I run out of space, don’t forget that Chelsea Jones at the Socorro Public Library is putting on Holi, the Hindu Festival of Colors Friday, where everybody throws colored powder all over each other with glee and wild abandon. Of course, unless the wind dies down, the rest of the city may be covered in layers of red, yellow, green, and purple powder.

Just in time for spring cleaning.