I have lived through seventy-one Chicago Marches. I have seen snow on Easter and seventy-degree days in February. I once wore shorts and a winter coat on the same Tuesday, which my wife said made me look “like a man who has given up,” and she was not wrong. But this March — this March — was something else. This was the month weather stopped pretending it had a plan and just started throwing things at us to see what would stick.

Let’s go through the numbers, because the numbers are unhinged. Of the thirty-one days in March 2026, seventeen of them — seventeen — experienced temperature swings wide enough to qualify as multiple seasons within a single calendar day. I’m not talking about a chilly morning and a warm afternoon. I’m talking about ice on your windshield at 7 a.m., t-shirt weather at noon, a thunderstorm at 3, and the kind of damp, leaf-smelling breeze at 6 p.m. that makes you think it’s October. That was a Wednesday. I believe it was March 11th. I had to change clothes three times. My dog refused to go outside after the second transition.

The meteorologists — God bless them, they try — have been using the phrase “dynamic pattern” to describe what happened this month. Tom Skilling, who has been explaining Chicago weather to us with the enthusiasm of a man who genuinely loves being confused by the atmosphere, called it “one of the most thermally volatile Marches in recent memory.” The high-low spread on March 4th was forty-three degrees. Forty-three. That’s not a temperature range, that’s a dare.

Here’s what I want to know, and I’ve been asking this for years: who is March for? January is winter. July is summer. September knows what it is. March doesn’t know what it is and doesn’t care that it doesn’t know. It’s the month that shows up to a job interview in a swimsuit and a parka and somehow gets the job because this is Chicago and we respect the hustle.

My neighbor Dave — who is a data guy, the kind of person who puts weather into spreadsheets for fun, which is a hobby I would mock if his spreadsheets weren’t so well-formatted — tracked the daily high and low temperatures for all thirty-one days and color-coded them by season using the meteorological definitions. His chart looks like someone dropped a bag of Skittles on a calendar. “Statistically,” he told me over the fence last Saturday, “this March was indistinguishable from random noise.” I told him that was the most Chicago thing anyone has ever said about weather, and he seemed pleased.

The practical consequences were, as always, sartorial. I saw a man on the Brown Line on March 15th wearing a fleece vest over a Hawaiian shirt with rain boots. He looked like three different people had been combined in a transporter accident. I couldn’t judge him because I was wearing a down jacket unzipped over a Cubs t-shirt with an umbrella tucked under my arm “just in case,” which is the unofficial motto of March in this city. Just in case. Always just in case.

My wife, who is smarter than me about most things and certainly about weather, stopped checking the forecast around March 9th. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Whatever it says, the opposite will also happen.” She has taken to leaving the house each morning with a tote bag containing sunglasses, gloves, an umbrella, and a light sweater, which she calls her “March kit.” I have adopted this practice. It is humiliating and effective.

Here’s the thing about Chicago in March, and I say this with the exhausted love of a man who has shoveled his walk in April: we don’t actually mind. We complain — of course we complain, complaining about weather is our second-favorite sport after complaining about the Bears — but we don’t mind. The chaos is the point. You can’t live here and demand consistency. You live here and you layer. You carry the bag. You change clothes three times on a Wednesday. And when someone from Phoenix or San Diego asks how you deal with it, you look at them with the quiet superiority of a person who has survived seventeen four-season days in a single month and you say: “You wouldn’t understand.”