In Defense of April

April is National Poetry Month. Say the words "April" and "Poetry" to most people and they will most likely come up with T.S. Elliot's famous words:

" April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

Now, I have always felt sad about this. You see, my birthday is in April. (In fact , it just went by and Peaches and Popcorn treated me to a "pretend" pamper session where they put "pretend" nail polish on my fingers and toes). Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I always felt April was getting a raw deal. To me it is a magical time, filled with the promise of the coming summer when the world seems to burst into life, redolent with the fragrance of flowers. With this in mind, I decided to involve the girls in working on our solitary flower bed. The good news is that they loved it! The bad news is that this seems to have unleashed their inner competitive gardener. We can hardly walk past a house now without high-pitched commentary. "Look, their flowers are bigger than ours and all of them are out." "They have pink and orange ones, look, look." I completely missed the trend on bright tulips that has hit our neighborhood like a Primitivist tsunami and our pale pink crocuses from last year are getting no respect. Daily,ever more ambitious plans are formulated for the biggest , brightest garden in the world. All to be executed by mom, of course. So April looks a little different now, I have to admit. My earlier rosy view did not involve so much digging for one thing.
Still, it has its poetic side. As Rainer Maria Rilke said it,

"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices
instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable
shrieking into the heart of the night."