I’ve written a lot on here about books and games and basically nothing about the town I actually live in, which now that I notice it feels like an odd gap, since a decent chunk of what I read and play in any given year is really just a response to March. Not the whole winter, I don’t mind most of winter, there’s a real coziness to January here that people who’ve never lived somewhere this cold don’t quite believe when I describe it. March is the part nobody warns you about.

By March the snow isn’t pretty anymore, it’s gray and compacted and refusing to fully melt, the lake ice goes through this genuinely unsettling stage where it’s too thin to walk on and too thick to call open water, and the whole town gets this specific flat, low-energy mood that I’ve started calling the March Face, everyone at the library develops it around the same week, patrons included. It’s not depression exactly, or it can tip into that for some people, but for most of us it’s more like a low hum of low-grade crankiness that everyone silently agrees to just push through together.

What I’ve noticed, and this took me a genuinely embarrassing number of years to connect, is that my reading and gaming both shift hard during that stretch. I stop reaching for anything that requires real patience or a slow build and grab for whatever has the most forward momentum, and Renata and I default to shorter, punchier games on the Tuesday table specifically because neither of us has the bandwidth in March for a four-hour campaign session. It’s not a conscious decision every year, it’s just what my hands reach for on the shelf, the same way they sort things by frequency without asking me first.

The thaw, when it actually comes, usually late March or the first week of April depending on the year, is genuinely dramatic here in a way I don’t think people from milder places quite get. One week everything’s gray and dead and the next the maple sap buckets are out along half the roads out of town and there’s a specific smell, wet dirt and cold water moving again, that I associate more with relief than with spring itself. I always mean to have some kind of small ritual for it and never actually do, mostly I just notice I’ve started reading slower books again without deciding to, and that’s usually how I know March actually let go this year.

I don’t think this town would suit everyone. I think it suits me specifically because I like a place that makes you earn the good months by sitting through the bad ones first.