Despite Eliot’s oft-quoted line about April, we all know that March is really the cruelest month, refusing to set us free of winter’s bleakness even as it tantalizes us with hints of spring. This year however, Thoreau’s journals in hand, I’ve decided to choose my own March. Today, for example, I could lie to myself about what’s outside my window here in blustery Chicago, choosing the weather of March 10, 1853 instead:

This is the first really spring day. The sun is brightly reflected from all surfaces, and the north side of the street begins to be a little more passable to foot-travellers. You do not think it necessary to button up your coat.

Oh, to go about with unbuttoned coat! A dream dreamed today only by fools and hobos!

Or I could opt for gratitude tinged with schadenfreude and turn to March 10, 1856:

Thermometer at 7 A.M. 6° below zero. Dr. Bartlett’s, between 6:30 and 7 A.M., was at -13° or -14°, at 6 A.M.
The snow hard and dry, squeaking under the feet; excellent sleighing. A biting northwest wind compels to cover the ears. It is one of the hardest days of the year to bear. Truly a memorable 10th of March. A bluebird would look as much out of place now as the 10th of January.

But, Plato-loving Aristotelian that I am, I’ll plough the middle ground instead, choosing the solace of relative accuracy and accompanying commiseration offered by March 10, 1854:

Misty rain, rain,–the third day of more or less rain. . . . Out now about 4 P.M.,–partly because it is a dark, foul day.

There’s much more to Thoreau’s journal than weather reports, of course, and if you’ve not yet looked at the new edition put out by the New York Review of Books Classics last fall, you’re in for a treat. Damion Searls’s introduction, which explains–and convincingly justifies–his surprisingly invasive editing of the journals for this one-volume edition, offers fascinating insight into the thinking of an editor charged with shaping an unwieldy bulk of material into an approachable, interesting book for a general audience. And the journals themselves, as presented in this edition, are packed with gems: observations, snatches of dialogue, odd trains of thought–all the pleasures for which we turn to Thoreau, plus the incomparable joys offered by the aimless dailiness of journal-keeping. Following his observations of the rain in the March 10, 1854 entry, for example, Thoreau tests out a thought about how spring rains help break up river ice, then follows a skunk,

a slender black (and white) animal, with its back remarkably arched, standing high behind and carrying its head low; runs, even when undisturbed, with a singular teeter of undulation, like the walking of a Chinese lady. Very slow; I hardly have to run to keep up with it. It has a long tail, which it regularly erects when I come to near and prepares to discharge its liquid. . . . Its eyes have an innocent, childlike, bluish-black expression.

He’s actively choosing to follow a skunk! This is what makes Thoreau different from (and stinkier than) you and me!

The entry right above the March 10, 1856 entry, meanwhile, offers this miniature anecdote of Emerson:

Minott said he saw Emerson come home from lecturing the other day with his knitting-bag (lecture-bag) in his hand. He asked him if the lecturing business was as good as it used to be. Emerson said he did n’t see but it was as good as ever; guessed the people would want lectures “as long as he or I lived.”

Pick this one up and leave it at your bedside to slowly wear out over the years; you won’t be disappointed.

As for me, for now I’ll wait to hear what Thoreau notes at the end of the March 10, 1853 entry:

What was that sound that came on the softened air? It was the warble of the first bluebird from that scraggy apple orchard yonder. When this is heard then has spring arrived.

If I just replace “warble” and “bluebird” with “crack” and “bat,” I’ll suddenly be much, much more confident that spring will be here by early April.