Peggy Dover

Weather forecasters are wreaking havoc with my meteorological spring fancies. According to the Pegorian calendar, March 1st is scheduled to launch the season of frisking lambs, ham and rejoicing.

Our average high for March is 58 degrees with eight days of rain. Today, each time I looked at my weather app, which was too often, despite shaking, it read 39. As of this writing, since it’s the fifth of the month, we have completed five of our eight allotted rain days.

March is proving out its leonine reputation. It shows no sign of stopping. I don’t want reminders about needing the moisture. I’m a Northwest gal all the way, just ready for a break and I’m not alone.

Weeks of cold rain/snow is a serious style cramper, and gloom is invading the psyche. When I get like that, the cat boys give me a wide berth. When clouds lay siege and the ceaseless rain intones by tap, tap, tapping from the rooftop, I begin to remind myself of Edgar Allan Poe.

Yes, his brooding nature, but also his looks — my forehead heightens and my eyebrows grow thick with a heavy, pensive brow line — no mustache, thank you. All I need is a cravat and a raven.

Cricket and Eddie are forlorn as well. They take one peep at the backyard full of water hazards and soggy birds and turn right around. Hence, they sleep all day, compounding their girth.

Since movie watching is a favorite pastime on stay-at-home days and to use to advantage the mood of brooding, I am going to run the 1947 version of “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” tonight with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. The musical score by Bernard Herrmann will accompany the melancholia brilliantly and make my heart ache for that ever elusive place. Herrmann is one of the absolute best at setting the tone in every movie he scored — which were many — and his list of credits is truly impressive. Think “Psycho” and “Citizen Kane.”

I adore Gene Tierney’s character, Lucy Muir, a widow of about a year in turn-of-the-20th-century England. She is utterly feminine with a mind of her own, which she demonstrates calmly and coolly to all those opinionated folks (men and women) who attempt to tell her what she wants and needs. I like to pretend that I’m her, on my better days.

She escapes London with her young daughter, played by Natalie Wood, and her housekeeper to live at Gull Cottage, an isolated and “unique” home by the sea. It’s not long before she meets a sea captain. I will refrain from saying too much, but the story is completely satisfying. For the mood of present times, it provides the perfect vehicle for embracing the yearning.

Lucy Muir is a good study of feminine strength. Apparently, March is the month to celebrate women. I thought every month was women’s celebration month. It seems so. When do the menfolk get a turn? Okay, I’ll dial down the snark-o-meter while you don your cornball flak jacket because here it comes.

And now, I leave you to ponder this disrespectful rendition of Poe’s “The Raven,” if I can see beyond my eyebrows to type, type, type it out. May it lift you from a weather-born malaise and not deposit you into the mud, which is everywhere.

The Weatherman

Once upon a Tuesday soggy, while I scribbled, bored and groggy

About the weather, nothing more uniquely bright

To help me through my plight,

While I nodded nearly sleeping

Came a messenger softly creeping

Creep, creep, creeping at my sodden door.

Ay caramba, it’s the springtime, not December

As the laden daffodils bend double,

Came the weatherman a-creeping

With the news I’ve come to dread.

When I asked him, midst the deluge

Carriage wheels a-splash in the road,

Lifting brows to ask him wherefore,

Will the rain continue forth?

His wellies squished out puddles on the floor,

At last he answered, lo, he answered,

Quoth the weatherman, “Evermore.”