Every year we fail to remember that March is still winter, a gift of cognition that makes us forget to be fearful of that first anachronistically warm sunny day, that makes us fail to believe the world could be any way other than how it is now. We forget, and so the snow returns to find us so unprepared, having exhumed shorts and tshirts from mothballed basement sarcophagi, betrayed by the instinct that decides the things that must remain peripheral to conscious understanding lest we begin to question the wisdom of reaching into the nothingness of the before and after and shaping what we find there into new life, the things that must remain unreal until they’re not, until it’s our Costco engulfed in flames during a holiday week. Our children, should we be so bold, won’t believe us when we tell them that March was ever winter.