The March so far

JenniferI asked my officemate S. today whether there were any specific phrases or poems or songs in Swedish about the month of mars, because it seems to me that mars in Sweden is a time of change and upheaval, of good and bad, and there are no half measures. Till exampel: last year in mars we had the fire that destroyed the lab; I went to my first bandy match; I got sick and had to visit a doctor for the first time; we had to move at the end of the month. Some of what happened last year can be accounted for by acknowledging that it was the second month of living in a new place, but so far, the twists and turns and highs and lows of mars 2009 are on a par with the last one, and not just for me.



T. ex., in temporal order: The weather was quite cold and wintery, and it snowed a lot; I started teaching for the first time in years; I came by my office one morning to find a woman gazing into it, and when asked if she needed help, she replied that she was moving into it soon and wanted to see what the furniture was like; I tried out a radical new way of getting to work that I don't much like; the local bandy team made it to the country-wide semifinals then crashed out in a terrible game that we saw in person; the Swedish women's soccer team beat Germany for the first time in seven years (and then beat the US, to win the Algarve Cup); my abstract was accepted to a conference and my advisor was so pleased that she told me that I should try to go to another conference this summer too; all of my students' lab experiments failed; various acquaintances both here and in the US have had surprising news about their employment status; I found out that one of the immigrants in my Swedish class had his cousin shot to death in Stockholm last weekend; another classmate, brought to Sweden by a lover and since abandoned, is now broke and has nowhere to go; my cousin had her baby and we have a new first cousin once removed (welcome C.S.!); my students gave their presentations this morning, only to be told that they also had to turn in written reports, which nobody knew about, and there was a lot of last-minute scrambling; the clouds parted and the sun shone bright and clear all day.

The answer to the question that started this post is "No, there are no particular saying about this month; april is usually considered the month of great change and turbulent weather." So that leaves it to me to make my own translation: Mars började som ett lejon; jag vill att det sluta som ett lamm.