April Thoughts

April is Poetry month.  April Showers, pennies from heaven, rain in Spain, hosts of golden daffodils, lilting shadows hiding the lowly toad.  Haiku poets, those poetasters who cannot sustain a conceit for more than three lines of 17 syllables will predictably bore the crap out of us with their endless attempts at defining the sunrise

Worthy poets will debate the merits of classical (net up or net down) forms.  Most poets will face another dreary season of uncompensated labor, while watching professional baseball players earn huge amounts of cash for playing games. 

It is a month of transitions:  Thoughts of poetry are overpowered and cast roughly to the ground in a headlock of temporal concerns.    This is the brief window of time when down-to-earth preparations will determine the state of the garden in august. We have started seeds in the basement under lights. Here in New England we have bravely (or is it naively?) put away our orange plastic shovels and are busy syphoning the gasoline from the snow blower tank into the lawn mower. 

   

Sweaters and long-sleeves are still at the ready, but shorts and Tee shirts have been taken-out  from winter storage.  The screen porch is ready.  It will soon be the favorite room in the house -- for coffee and bacon sandwiches in the morning; then reading and frosty beers in the late afternoon.  We have started letting Mocha – the 5 year old male Siamese out in the fenced-in yard for short run-arounds.  He’s been confined to the inside world all winter and enjoys venturing outside, stalking chipmunks and squirrels despite their ability to evade his grasp.

April is the cruelest month, according to poet TS Elliot, probably because of the vagaries of the weather – one day’s sunny promise gives rise to expectations of relief from the chill of winter then a day later yanking us back to reality with arctic blasts.    

 It is the last month when you can safely eat oysters until September, according to the tales of old wives.

But life is too short to pay attention to old crones.  The mouth waters at the very thought of a plate of a dozen chilled blue points served on the half-shell on a summer night with a Tanqueray Martini straight-up with olive.