D-Day + 46: April is the cruelest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

-T.S. Eliot

It’s cloudy out today.  Ed says the forecast tells us it will get up to 85 degrees (85!), but with the cloud clover, it just doesn’t seem likely.  The thing is, I chose Colorado as my home largely because of the 300 days of sunshine per year.

Today, I think I am getting gypped.

In reality, it’s only fitting that this final day of this particular month should be so gloomy.  After all, April bites.  With apologies to all those who think that April brings spring and flowers and longer days, well….it also brings rain and clouds and false hope of warm days.  And this year, the lingering coronavirus lockdown, more deaths, and more gnashing of teeth over what the new normal might be in the age of COVID-19.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that April is a month filled with a history of bad stuff happening.  This month, our daily “This Day in History” from the Denver Post has been full of terrors and disasters that happened in past Aprils.  I’ve written before about the Boston Marathon bombings.  But what of so many others?

There was the first major San Francisco earthquake (April 26, 1906).  The Virginia Tech shooter (April 16, 2007).  The Oklahoma City bombing (April 19, 1995). The Ludlow Massacre (April 20, 1914). The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968).  The Chernobyl disaster (April 26, 1986).  Heck, Coca-cola announced that they were changing the formula of Coke and rolling out “New Coke” on April 23, 1985.  If that wasn’t an unmitigated disaster, I don’t know what is.

April 15^th is a particularly heinous day in history.  In addition to the Boston Marathon bombings, there’s a long list of other disastrous events.  The sinking of the Titanic (1912).  The assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865).  And just last year, the Notre Dame fire in Paris.  And none of that is to mention the normal IRS deadline for filing taxes.

Notre Dame, 1987

 Closer to home, there was the Columbine School shooting on April 20, 1999.  I was in Dallas, managing a project, on the day of the shooting.  Most of my team members were people who lived in Colorado, including some with kids in school.  We started getting emails and phone calls about that horrific event, and spent a nervous afternoon getting updates.  I didn’t know Ed at that time, but he got calls asking him to come help film the event (for news outlets) as it unfolded.  He (so wisely) declined the offers of work.  Some things are just not worth any amount of money.  Mark Obmascik, one of my favorite authors, did not have a choice for opting out;  he was a reporter for one of the Denver daily newspapers.  He went on to win a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on Columbine, but it scarred him.  (We birders were blessed when his soul-cleansing project resulted in the book, “The Big Year” – all about birds and birders, nothing about disasters and whack-job disaster-mongers.) 

Most close to home, our friend Rick’s youngest daughter was a student at Columbine at the time.  She escaped, but was shot at in the process, and she still bears the mental and emotional scars from surviving something like that. Every year on April 20^th, Rick and his daughter get together.  It’s a tough day for her, understandably.  It’s a tough day for him, too.  This year, they shared a bottle of wine at his house, then she went home to her husband and kids.  Rick called us for a virtual happy hour afterwards.  It was clear he didn’t want to be alone.  How do you deal with social distancing when you desperately want to reach out and give someone a big bear hug?

As for me, the novelty of the shelter-in-place order is wearing thin.  The moth infestation of our closet, and then the rat infestation in our yard:  these things pretty well annihilated my sense of order and cleanliness and security in my own home.  The Clean-a-thon was always work, but it started out as a fun thing to do together.  Then reality set in, and the fun transformed into duty and drudgery.  The deep cleaning continues now at a snail’s pace, and the whole damn house is becoming dirty all over again.  Where does all the dust and dirt come from?  I appreciate our housecleaners more now than ever.

Alas.  There is really nothing to be done except to soldier on.  As the prospect of May – just a day away! – comes nearer, I’ll try to focus on the good stuff that happens in April.  For as many bad things happen in April, there have been some really good ones, too.  World Earth Day happens every April (first celebrated April 22, 1970), no matter how much our current administration is trying to destroy the earth.  We also have coronavirus to thank for lowering – if just temporarily – the effects of human pollution of the earth. Nelson Mandela was first elected as president of the Republic of South Africa on April 27, 1994, proving that despotic regimes don’t always last forever.  And, most fittingly, the World Health Organization was established on April 7, 1948.  We can only hope that when we get rid of our despot, we will again return to funding the WHO in order to help in the prevention and mitigation of future pandemics.

Still, for all that, I am looking forward to May, and the prospects of more sunshine and more good news about containing and eradicating COVID-19.  We still have virtual happy hours to hold with friends, and more Zoom calls with our extended families.  We’ll finish up the deep cleaning and pray that it’s safe sometime soon to bring our cleaning crew back in the house.  We’ve already told our favorite restaurant proprietor that we want to be the first reservation when he’s able to reopen.  In the meantime, April:  don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.