Oh, March! How fickle can you get?

Looking out my window today, I've seen rain, sunshine, a 20-minute blizzard, and now sunshine again.

I remember learning at my great-grandmother's knee that March either "comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb" or vice-versa --- -- an evocative old weatherwise maxim which, of course, creates fantastic imagery in a 5-year-old's brain (a huge, fierce lion with a stormcloud head, a placid, wooly little lamblet standing in an impossibly green field ringed with daisies. And the lamb was smiling -- yes, smiling, if you can imagine).

Someone later told me the saying, like so many things, has its origins in zodiacal symbolism, since Aries (which the sun enters on March 20 this year) is the Sign of the Ram. But in that case, wouldn't it be more appropriate to say "March comes in like a shark"? Can't quite figure that one out.

Still, it does make today the official Last Day of Winter, and that's something to be happy about, even if it's doubtful the arrival of Spring tomorrow will tame Utah's schizoid weather patterns -- it's pretty much bound to be lion-lamb-lion-lamb-lion-lamb all the way through the month of May.