Last week was beautiful. The sun came out, temperatures rose, and walkers showed up in the neighborhood. Today, though, it is snowing again, covering over the hopeful ground with another layer of cold. Ah, March.

March is that in-between month, when winter struggles to make space for spring. When too-early buds appear only to freeze. When snowstorms out of the north give way to thunderstorms rising from the south. Coats are exchanged for jackets and then sweaters, only to be replaced by coats again.

And our spirits, still living in February’s Lent, lean forward to glimpse April’s Easter through the unremarkable month of March.

We treat March like flyover country—that unexamined distance between leaving and arriving. Would it be so bad to skip March altogether?

Perhaps we should welcome March like Bulgarians do. We hosted a number of Bulgarian students in our home, and they shared with us their tradition of “Martenitsa”. They make little yarn tassels and wear them during March until a stork or swallow is seen, symbolizing the arrival of Spring. Then they hang the tassels on any blooming tree.

These students understood how to savor March instead of dismiss it. How to watch eagerly for hints of hope instead of simply marking the days to April.

March, after all, is also a state of mind. It’s that in-between time of coming out of darkness and sensing light on the horizon of our lives. Of glimpsing hope after a long season of grief. March is anticipation. March is the anteroom of promise.

Those students taught me to wear the tassels of faith, and then to adorn the blooming promise that is Spring, when it finally appears, with gratitude.

Over the years, our Bulgarian students brought us homemade wine and baklava, rose water and embroidered handkerchiefs. But perhaps their best gift was teaching me how to appreciate the maddening, muddy, beautiful gift that is March.

Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.

Hosea 6:3