It’s a long time since I read The Wasteland. I remember that upper floor classroom and the lesser-loved of our English teachers, the one who dragged us through Elliot and Chaucer in a double period on Thursday mornings, the one who told us what we must read – and what it meant.
His colleague gave us the syllabus options and said ‘you choose’ – a class vote on which Shakespeare, which poets, which other things? It was Potter who gave us Harry 5 and Ant & Cleo and Godot. It was Potter took us to the city to watch plays we weren’t studying so that we
learned to feel the language, who took us to watch the Polanski films. It was Potter who earlier had given us Clare and Lawrence and Hardy…and once (as a punishment) gave my best friend Debs and I the two truths speech from MacBeth to learn and recite front-of-class (and we did).
Faulkner merely dragged us through the texts. So I don’t know a thing about The Wife of Bath and I have no idea why April was the cruellest month.
And yet, I agree. For me, it is.
It was in April that Mam went to the pantry to take out lamb for roasting, and fell to the floor. She existed for perhaps a month longer, but she lived no more. It was by then a long-gone April when her best friend, my maiden aunt, my godmother, struggled to breathe past her birthday, and then gave up her ghost. It was April the year following Mam when my Dad, likewise, stayed alive to see me on St George’s Day, his birthday, and died exactly one week later. He always referred to the 23rd of April as England’s Day of National Rejoicing…which of course it never was. He loved that he shared his birthday with Shakespeare, and with Boot (“the Noble Dog”). It was in April that Clive spent his last four days – on one of which he quoted Dad “it wasn’t meant to be like this.”
Forgive me, then. I am not a fan of April.
I love that days are now longer. I would say I look for spring, but the seasons are as unhinged as I am at this time. Across the road, the beech tree is only now losing its autumn leaves, even though the plum has bloomed and shed.
I do look for the flowers. Grape hyacinth come first. And then forget-me-nots – and the memory of Clive asking "what are those pretty little blue ones?" They grow wild where his foxes used to play. My garden that was his is tamer now, but still the flowers grow. Each year it seems something different comes. But the forget-me-nots are constant.
This year it is red dead nettle that dominates. Its leaves shade upwards from the green of the grass at base to the purple pre-cursor to its flowers. And there is softness about it that begs for stroking. It brings the first bees to my garden, just as my first peacock butterfly finds a path-crack dandelion.
There is one long warm afternoon, that has me standing barefoot on the grass trying to rebalance my body, to earth myself.
The magpie found the blackbird nest in the holly tree. So not such a happy afternoon. And I try not to take sides.
Then it turns cold again.
There are moorhen chicks on the pond. Robins in the lane. Bluetits in the boxes. Maybe the blackbirds are rebuilding.
We walk a loke where wild garlic grows. Meanwhile the Blackdale path is shooting the three-cornered variety. I realise I am no naturalist because I don’t care that one belongs here and the other doesn’t. We are all invasive.
Everything that grows anywhere, once did not. And at some point, will no longer. Ferns are prehistoric, but did they always grow this far north? And if not, what was there here, then, in the ‘before’? What will follow them? Will our creeks become mangrove swamps? Our marshes dry to deserts…or just freeze over, when the Gulf Stream disappears?
In the meantime, I will walk those paths again, or ones much like them, and I will drown myself in white flowers: garlic (wild, three-cornered or mustard), and cow-parsley, and stitchwort, late-flowering peach or pear, dog-rose, daisies, clover, and night-sweet-smelling campion. I will walk the bluebell woods until the seas warm to welcome me. I will swim on waves of summer, blue and white…when May comes.
I will be happier when there is less standing water in the fields, even though I know that this is a necessary April drenching, that may provide for summer drought survival. When every field is blue-pooled with grief, it is too much.
I will be more settled when I can write my Morning Pages on the back stoop, without the coffee freezing, when a passing cloud doesn’t send a shiver down my spine, like the goose upon the grave.
I will be happier when those tiny buds on the wisteria grow rampant, when the fuchsia cut-back to earth, but sprouting, confirms that it has survived the frost (or not).
Perhaps it is the uncertainty of spring that upsets me so. All this new life and so much death. And so much that is merely potential. Not a single bulb I planted showed itself above the surface, and yet the strawberry plants survived unprotected, and the wild things show me how it’s done.
You tell me that April comes from the Latin aperire (to open). Perhaps because of the opening of the skies and all the showers that fall. Perhaps because of the opening of the buds and flowers – although the daffodils are dying already, and the blackthorn has shaken her confetti to the ground.
Perhaps because it is the doorway into Summer. If so, please, let it open soon. I am not a fan of April.
