WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote

from shutterstock

The first day of April! The snow is on the ground, but Spring is in the air. I am so excited because Nathan and I are going to West Bend to have a marvelous Easter feast at the Top O’ The Ridge restaurant with Mom and Dad and Michelle and Frank, and after we are bursting at the seams Nathan will roll himself home leaving me behind to spend a week with my parents! I am so excited! Going to their house is always a treat, and this way I’ll get to spend some real-time extended with the folks. As we have all gotten older we have become more and more friends, I can’t think of who else I’d enjoy spending a few days with. And the sap is running in the maple woods, and maybe I’ll get to see them make syrup. My Mom keeps their comfy little house so clean and tight (I try but will never be as tidy and organized as she is), and she has a lovely little cat, Addison, who is the queen of their house.

The title for my post up there is old English. Well, Middle English. It means “When in April, the showers sweet” and it is the first line of the Canterbury Tales. April can be a muddy month in Wisconsin. We’re not quite done with snow, but shoures soote come too. But the air! The air is clean and sweet and ripe with new life. I was just at My brother and sister-in-law’s farm, and they’ve got sweet little calves in the pasture and lettuces already poking up in the planters. I love going to Bri and Jodi’s, it really seems a realm apart. Often when we go, like last weekend, Brian will start a fire in an old metal livestock water tank and we’ll all hunch around it (it is still in the thirties, but is warmer in the sun), holding cups of coffee and just talking and laughing. I think Bri had some red cedar on the fire and it smelled so sweet. He gave me a round of red cedar to put in my ‘dainty unmentionables’ drawer. Finally, it was time to go home, and we all smelled of fire smoke. It was heavenly. That night I pulled a bit of my hair over on the pillow so I could keep smelling it. I wore my Blackwatch flannel shirt again the next day, just so I could keep sniffing the sleeves.

Spring seems to me, to be a better time to make resolutions than January.

January is lip cracking cold and tight, a time when we curl inwards.

Spring is a transformative time of the year,

when possibilities, like the noses of crocus,

poke up and are visible. I

want to reach the sun

A bulb that’s been resting under the earth all winter.

Spring comes, some warmer days,

some sunshine and sweet showers and I just want to

become! become! become!

I see that first robin, and that’s when Spring is real for me!

My poetic muse grouchily huffs under her layers of afghans and quilts

and reaches out to the bedstead for her glasses (rose-colored).

Rhymes and meter and words, always the words,

holy in their own right tickle her ears.

Love poems, songs and laments, silly poems,

poems with form and poems that are as free as mayflies,

and as fleeting.

Got to grab them all quick, before they are beyond reach of your pen.

Spring, Spring, hurry as a rabbit, thin with Winter, finds buds on the bushes.

Oh, and you know, you know soon it will be lilacs

for a precious few weeks, and hostas thrusting up,

elbowing aside the dead leaves of last Fall.

Everything is brighter and a haze of green

begins to buzz in the treetops.

leaves unfold in stop-motion glory

like monarchs from cocoons and the upswelling

of the cold pure ice water in the lakes

promises warm days to come and fishing and picnics.

And it is all pushing forward with new life, every new morning. Spring!