The cruelest month? not April!

Thomas Stearns Eliot may not have provided us with an accurate insight when he wrote the opening lines of The Waste Land:

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Today, April Fool's Day, on the cruel side of the ledger, we have so far:

1. Taken the dogs to the vet for their Spring checkup;
2. Written a check to pay our 2018 state income taxes;
3. Written a check to pay our 1st quarter 2019 state estimated tax;
4. Written a check to pay our 1st quarter 2019 federal estimated tax;
5. Written a check to pay the service fee for our 2019-2020 heating and air conditioning tune ups;
6. "Suffered" cloudy skies and below normal temperatures;
7. Spent an inordinate amount of time searching for a simple, inexpensive hand tool.

On the side of the ledger marked "considerate," the good news is that we have fundamentally healthy if overweight dogs; money available to cover the checks we wrote for vets, taxes, heat and cooling; plus, we learned we've been nominated "for the Comfort Lake- Forest Lake Watershed District’s 2019 Watershed Champion Award!" due to our postings here; and, the missing hand tool was found in the hip pocket of jeans we were wearing when last we used it. That leaves cloudy, cold Spring weather, which is typical for Minnesota in April (and many another months as well). It's our tendency toward being afflicted by SAD that's a problem.

Although Thomas Stearns correctly notes the discord between April's pros and cons, on balance, we believe he comes to an off balance conclusion. We are reminded of the wonderful, and apt, quotation from Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

In that vein, we would respectfully, and humbly, like any proper underling, suggest the problem is not in April but in our temperament and expectations, i.e., ourselves.

April 1st also brings us to the start of National Poetry Month. That, and incoming migrants, are what we intend to focus on for the rest of the month. We'll consider the need for tax protests next year. Maybe we'll even write a poem about it.

An Old Story

Tracy K. Smith, 1972

We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
                                                               A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.