We deserve spring.

We deserve daffodils and soft green grass and sunshine that falls softly on our shoulders, like the hand of a friend.

We deserve to drink cold lemonade in the shade.

What we are getting, mostly, is frozen.

Windshields glazed with ice on mornings when the temperature dips into the teens.

Sidewalks and roads and highways gaining a fresh white coat scarcely hours after the remnants of the previous storm have melted.

The snow shovel continues to blister our palms while the lawnmower languishes in the shed or garage, yet to belch its first cloud of fragrant blue smoke.

Winter, the cruel old nag, hasn’t the common decency to go away, nor the ability to recognize that it has done quite enough to us since the first flakes of November.

(Or perhaps it was October, so seamlessly do the chill months run together. Long ago it was, anyway.)

It is the most stubborn season, certainly, here in our mountain valley nearly halfway to the North Pole and too far from the Pacific to gain but a meager benefit from its moderating influence on temperatures.

Summer, too, can linger beyond the equinox.

But it is not so persistent. And it seems to me that an 80-degree afternoon in mid-October is an unseasonable event most of us cherish, or at least appreciate.

Its opposite, the April blizzard, is by contrast mostly despised, I believe.

Farmers might welcome the moisture but even they typically prefer the spring precipitation in liquid rather than solid form.

March, of course, tends to be the transition, both on the calendar and outside where weather actually happens.

Not for nothing is the aphorism about the lion and the lamb applied to the month.

But this March has roared rather than bleated.

As of this writing, a few days before month’s end, it is the second-coldest March at the Baker City Airport since World War II.

The average high temperature is about 9 degrees below average.

But it’s a statistical comparison that seems to me the more telling description of this month.

The temperature, through the first 28 days, topped 50 degrees only once. On 13 of those days it didn’t even make it to 40, a temperature that is not especially strange even in the depths of January.

A year ago, by contrast, the temperature got to 50 or higher on 17 of the 31 days — and surpassed 60 on seven days.

Even so, the average high temperature in March 2022 was just 2 degrees above the long-term average — was, then, pretty nearly normal.

Which is to say, we are not being unreasonable in expecting at least a few balmy days during March, even if these springlike periods are interrupted by snow flurries.

Although the snow shovel is the implement most often associated with winter, I tend to judge the season by another tool, one more typically employed indoors.

My wife, Lisa, bought this homemade straw broom while visiting her friend in South Carolina almost 20 years ago. And although I have not made a keen observation of the many brooms I have wielded in my life, I can be confident in saying that this South Carolina broom is the finest of them, having lost none of its utility in nearly two decades.

(Something which can’t be said of most household items, including many that cost substantially more than a broom.)

This broom’s bristles are so stout that I prefer it over a snow shovel to clear our back porch (which we use as our main entrance rather than the front door; whether this is because the back door leads more directly to the kitchen I can’t say).

But I also frequently deploy the broom for weightier snow-clearing tasks, including the walkway between the yard and the driveway, and even parts of the driveway itself, the more typical domain of the shovel.

My morning routine, carried out before dawn on weekdays, is to open the back door to see what the night has brought, and thus whether I’ll need the broom.

Along about the middle of March, when the porch light revealed yet again a fresh couple of inches, I reached for the broom, which hangs by a loop of string, with something that felt like regret.

I slipped on a pair of boots and made the first couple awkward sweeps while holding the screen door partially open.

(I try to avoid stepping on the fresh snow and compressing it into boot-shaped layers that are hard to dislodge, but because the snow tends to drift against the door jamb, this requires a stance that puts me at great risk of either a grievous groin injury or a concussive tumble right off the porch.)

As I broomed my way through the gate and into the driveway it struck me that March was on the wane and yet, based on the extended weather forecast, April was likely to begin before we had any days that even an optimist would describe as springlike.

Indeed a couple days later, after the snow had slunk back to the shaded shelter beneath trees and on the sun-deficient north side of our house, another storm swept through and all was as it had been.

Including me, clutching the broom in the cold dark, as though Christmas were the closest holiday rather than Easter Sunday.