This has felt like the longest winter ever. And waking up to snow on the first day of April was hard to take. My husband and a couple of good friends have been planning to go on regular Friday morning walks for the past few weeks and each Friday has been too cold, too rainy, and now too snowy.
We have had snow in April before. I remember my good friend Reni had tickets for a Handel opera in mid-April. She’s a real opera buff and lover of Handel, so she bought tickets for mid-April thinking she was safe and her plans would not be upended by bad weather. Well, we had a major snowstorm, the trains were not running, and Reni did not get to the opera.
So yes, it’s happened before, but I can't recall ever feeling this annoyed. When I was working I had another annoyances to deal with and less time to obsess about the weather.
Maybe April really is the cruelest month. On a grim April day, we English major types all have that refrain running through our heads, kind of like a pop song you just cannot get out of your mind:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with Spring rain
(I did not have to google this – the words are burned in my brain--although I did have to check for the line spacing.)
Oh well as Nance wrote on a comment on my last post complaining about the weather: "Spring has never entirely let us down, yet, so hang in there."
I promise: no more posts bemoaning the bad weather. As my husband said your blog is turning into a weather report.
Wow, Karen, your posting unleashed swirling memories! The whole snowbound endless attempt to get up to NY came back in vivid detail. I think it may have been La Clemenza di Tito but perhaps it was Ariodante.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if those of us who are feeling ground down by the weather may be yielding to pathetic fallacy. The political situation in the US is so hostile to any but the egregiously greedy and there is so much turmoil and sorrow in the world (300 at Fukushima are laboring heroically and possibly mortally without knowing if their families survived) that we feel the heavens weeping with us. And, as you imply, our mild disappointment gives us something manageable to grumble about.
In April I always think Chaucer. Though we've had no March drought, I do long to go on pilgrimage!
Chaucer sure is more upbeat than Eliot!
ReplyDeleteI have no great longing to go on pilgrimage. I just want to get into my garden.
It's nice that you write about these things. It is important.
ReplyDelete