March may feel old hat to most when it swings around, third in queue; but it’s always been a month of beginnings for me.

For one, March was the month when, seven years ago, I started this humble blog, where I have ranted and raved and written and generally kept myself amused and self-guilted into continuing to do it.

I also found out I was pregnant, that same March.
(Aside: NOTHING ever prepares you for that moment when the second line appears.)

March was the month I met my future husband– the month we had our first date.

It was also the month in which I discovered there was no turning around in his no longer being my husband.

It was also the month, two years ago, in which he went to faraway and violent lands.

And March was also when I moved to this mythical land of beauty and corruption, lo these six years.
And during that March of 2006, I fell irreversibly in love with this strange little swampy hamlet that a friend once described as, “a city in training wheels.” I have sweated and shoveled snow and been windblown seven ways to Sunday; I’ve provided nourishment for 80,000 mosquitoes as well as two sons; I have cursed more helicopters than I’d previously seen in the sum total of my life’s experience; I have touristed up and photographed motorcades and blossoms and statues and congressmen. I have pointed at flags and bawled through Fourth of July fireworks and seen history being made four blocks away from my house.

And I’ve also found myself. I just didn’t know I was hiding somewhere in DC all this time.

I want to thank the month of March for existing in calendars.