The month of March, then called Martius, was the first month of the earliest Roman calendar. Named for Mars, the god of war, it became the third month when the Romans began using the Julian calendar. The first month of spring, March was traditionally the time when war was resumed after the winter hiatus. Some historians suggest that it refers to the fact that armies began their march toward new conquests at that time of year.

The proverb that states that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb is probably based on astronomers’ observations of the positions of the constellations Leo The Lion and Aries The Ram (male sheep) at that time of year. It has evolved into a hopeful prediction that if March begins with cold or stormy weather, it will end with mild, pleasant weather – or vice versa.

One modern-day symbol for the month of March is a simple toy kite; the kind we assemble from slender sticks, paper and string. Flying those rudimentary kites requires a certain amount of moving air to keep them aloft. The challenge, for me at least, has always been getting them up into the air in the first place. My mother believed that the more wind there was, the better were the conditions for kite-flying. On a windy March Saturday she would send us, quarters in hand, to the Ben Franklin Store to purchase the kits for assembling our kites. We made our selections, based not on the lofting qualities of the assembled product, but on the design and colors printed on the fragile paper that was to catch the wind and take our creations soaring into the spring sky.

Back home with our treasures, we commandeered the kitchen table for our work station and laid out our purchases. The two sticks were joined by a wire at the proper crossing point and the sticks were notched at the ends to make it easy to attach the loops of string that protruded from the perimeter of the precious paper “skin” for the kite. I seem to remember that Mother always had plenty of sturdy string for the requisite bow-strings and the tether string that would connect us to our kites once they were floating magically far overhead. I never understood the science involved in the “tails” to be attached to the bottom of a kite. I was never sure about its purpose or necessity. I believed it had something to do with the speed of the wind, but just how to judge the length and weight of the tail eluded me.

The only thing I knew for sure from my own experience was that I should stand with my back to the wind, hold my kite high, and slowly release it as the wind pushed against it. It was supposed to sail away and climb steadily upward. My kite nearly always jerked from my hand, twirled crazily upward, wavered horizontally for several moments as if trying to make up its mind about the undertaking, then nose-dived into the ground and lay broken and torn not ten feet from where I stood.

I credit that result to the wind. I never agreed with Mother’s theory that the stronger the wind, the better for kite-flying. I base that belief on my many failures at launching my kite successfully. With a mere breeze, I couldn’t simply release the kite for the wind to take hold of it. I had to create my own wind by running into the breeze and releasing the kite when I felt the air tugging at it. Sometimes this strategy almost worked and my kite would float skyward for several moments, only to land on the roof of the garage, crash into the neighbor’s house or entangle itself with a bush or tree.

Mother always saved the surviving sticks and repairable paper skins from crashed kites and cheerfully helped me rebuild my kite and my self-confidence, but I never once during my life have successfully launched and flown a kite. Oh, I’ve stood beside other kite-pilots, holding my tether-string and watching my kite dance yards and yards overhead, but it had been my dad who put it up there. In case you never noticed, two constellations are represented by the shape of our simple toy kite. The Southern Cross traces the outline of the kite’s body; the Northern Cross shows the two crossed sticks that dictate and support its shape.