There is a rhyme with which most of us are familiar: “April showers bring May flowers.” In a cursory search for the origins of this rhyme, I found a website called “Feelings and Flowers” that discussed the origin; the author, Ken Bolt, made a case for Thomas Tusser’s collection of writings in 1557, “A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry.” In a section called “April Husbandry,” Tusser wrote, “Sweet April showers/ Do spring May flowers.” Bolt contends that this is one of the earliest references to the “showers/flowers” phenomenon of April and May, but a commenter on the Web site cites lines from the prologue to “The Canterbury Tales.” I tapped out at this point, to leave the research to brains with greater capacity than mine.
April 2016 has brought Indianapolis four seasons’ worth of weather, and — on the cusp of the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500 — a racer’s dream: zero to 60 degrees in less than 5 days. I saw a social media post about the short and dramatic shifts of weather that read, “Mother Nature must be going through menopause!” (Learning from the long lecture my eldest daughter gave me about menopause, I’d have to say that Mother Nature is going through “perimenopause.” See? Men do listen.) I was awakened one early April morning by the sound of squirrels wearing baseball cleats scampering across the roof; it turned out to be hail. Another early April morning, I looked into the backyard through a gauzy haze that turned out to be snow. Snow! I am all for the April showers, that forceful hammering the rains deliver to the earth, drumming awake the buds of spring. Which buds have sprung forth at the earliest, and forthwith, been damaged by, what? Snow and cold, you say? April is a naughty month.
There is, however, some evidence that those showers have initiated the process of bud growth. Where once bare branches lay like scratches outside my kitchen window, the house sparrow now sits in the comfort of some early leaves. A spindly bush beneath my bird feeder has sprouted pinkish-purple buds, and I have been posting on social media, a poem each day, in honor of National Poetry Month. (That last may not be the direct result of the showers thing.)
For some time, I have recognized National Poetry Month by posting a poem each of the 30 days of April. I did not do so in 2015 because I mistakenly assumed that the deaths of two friends in the month of April made my observations frivolous. I no longer think that, so I’ve continued the tradition. I’ve gotten some unlikely “likes” from acquaintances, people with whom I’ve not had conversations about poetry, and what I feel about it. I was posting, as Dylan Thomas wrote, “Not for ambition or bread/ Or the strut and trade of charms/ On the ivory stages…” in his poem, “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” I’ve not practiced enough of that craft, that sullen art, lately (though one of my posts was of a poem I wrote). Prose flows more often from my fingertips, 600 words that fit within the margins of this column, the kind of prose that my hard-bitten journalist sister calls “fluff.” (She assigned me the task of writing our mother’s obituary, so I guess my fluff was good enough, huh, Jaci?)
And then, there’s the other fluff of April for me, for one April day — the 12th, to be exact — my youngest daughter, Lauren, came bawling into my life, the perfect embodiment of “showers, flowers and poetry,” and a reason to celebrate April.