Don’t you love March? Especially since the calendars for February and March are nearly interchangeable? It’s quite confusing to flip up the February page and see that all the numbers are the same until you get to the end.

Well, this has been a nice week with lots of sunshine and not too much wind. Not to get complacent, though, because we’ve got this March lion to contend with and more times than I can count, March weather has been horrid.

And then there’s April, and what we used to call mud week. I think today it’s called spring break.

Mud week was always a week of school vacation. Nowadays, of course, many who can afford it, go to Walt Disney World or somewhere on vacation. When I look back on mud week, no one I knew went anywhere. Parents didn’t get a week off and kids just moped around the house wondering what to do. Too muddy to jump rope; too many ice/snow patches in the woods making it wet and cold; not warm enough for outdoor games.

It was called mud week for generations, this melting muddy week in April. Schools were closed because the few school buses couldn’t maneuver the old dirt roads which were thawing out and making travel impossible, i.e., mud!

Kids walked to school when they lived within a mile of their school, anyway, but the bus went to pick up those who lived out in the boondocks. And even those kids gathered at various meeting spots because back then, very few roads were “tarred” and some of the dirt roads were still icy and frozen.

When the town talks about the condition and impassibility of today’s camp roads (private roads), I often think about my childhood in Windham when most of the roads were that way. Chute Road, where I lived, was a dirt road from River Road to Windham Center Road. This was long before it was called Albion Road from the Pope Road to the Windham Center Road.

Chute Road was so-named for the Chute families who lived there – George Chute at the corner of Swett Road and Hughie Chute who lived in a big, white house, high up on the hill near the intersection of Pope Road.

Like other Windham roads, Chute Road was one car wide and for a long time in the spring, grass grew in the center of the road. There weren’t many cars in those days, so if by chance you met another on the road, one would pull off into the field alongside to allow the other to pass.

Chute Road didn’t get tarred until about 1954 following a devastating hurricane which flooded the road and washed away the centuries-old bridge constructed over Colley Wright Brook taking with it enormous chunks of granite.

March will scamper away quickly and then we can face mud week. Disney World anyone?

See you next week.