March has hit me especially hard this year.
It’s partly related to the stress of moving from one house to another. But it goes deeper than that. March is tough because of the tough memories it brings.
March 3, 2020 was Election Day in Putnam County. A brisk turnout was expected for the Presidential Preference Primary. I was to serve as officer—the person in charge of the precinct–at Double Springs. When my phone rang shortly before 4:00 a.m., the person on the other end of the line was one of my poll workers.
“I’m calling to tell you I can’t make it in to work today,” she said. “The storm has my road completely blocked.”
I soon learned that the storm was the EF-4 tornado that brought unthinkable death and destruction to the western part of our community. Several voting precincts in that section of the county were unusable, so we scrambled to find workers and set up voting machines at the election office. Now here we are—six years later–getting ready for another election, though it’s a county primary this time, and the hard tornado memories come flooding back.
And, of course, there are memories of COVID.
Do you remember hearing on the news about the mysterious virus running rampant in China and feeling so very sad for the people who lived there? I sure do. How could any of us have been so naïve as to believe the virus could be contained to the far east? How many of us had even an inkling that a devastating global pandemic was in store?
I flew to Denver to visit family in the middle of March that year, on the second day of the SEC men’s basketball tournament. Tennessee was scheduled to play Alabama while my plane was in the air. When we touched down and were allowed to take our phones out of airplane mode, the first thing I did was check the score. GAME CANCELLED I read.
Cancelled? Why? The answer was soon abundantly clear: Coronavirus-19 hadn’t stayed in China. You know the rest of the story.
I spent the next week in Denver with my kiddos, eyes glued to the news. I often try to visit around St. Patrick’s Day, which is why I was there that year. Grandson Oliver wears his “Lucky Charms” t-shirt–featuring Lucky the Leprechaun–and we have Reuben sandwiches, washed down with a mug of Guiness, of course. But not in 2020.
Though I’d flown in for my visit, my plan was to drive home on the 18th with Cookeville friends who’d been in skiing in Colorado. They called me on March 15. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” I was told. “Meet us on the curb at seven sharp.”
No Reuben sandwiches. No Guiness. No Lucky the Leprechaun.
With uncertainty and trepidation, we began the 1,200-mile journey back to Tennessee on eerily uncrowded highways. We shared the road with few vehicles except eighteen-wheelers and stopped for food and gas at truck stops, which were pretty much the only places open for business. For more than a year, the world was turned upside down. But anyone reading this no doubt remembers it all in great detail.
Now here we are, in 2026. Things are “normal” again, though I could write a tome refuting that statement. The redbuds have burst into bloom just as the daffodils are finishing up. As I begin writing this column, it’s snowing. Real snow, the kind that covers the grass. The 2026 SEC basketball tournament was not cancelled, but—sad to say–neither Tennessee nor Vanderbilt won. The spring peepers are singing once again in the shallow pond outside the Putnam County election office.
But I have a feeling way down deep inside that, for the remainder of what I hope will be a very long life, March will be always be at least a little bit hard.
(March 21, 2026)