Just April…

My neighbor is this evening mowing his lawn, and not just mowing, but giving it a burr-cut, the air around and between us just noise, just noise.

Still, we’re talking April 24th, as in April…again, just April. The same April that saw 85 degrees on the 10th, and me that day cursing every degree over freezing; me that Sunday in my drawers and only my drawers, in the living room, the windows open, fans fanning, the air otherwise dead and me, again, loudly cursing every degree over freezing.

Back in the Vermont I knew (and, yes, I already hear my children moaning, “There goes Dad again about Vermont, those perfect summers, winters walking through head-high snow—and that’s only after shoveling—and, any god knows, you were the better for the shoveling!”), April was April.

If lucky, April was a muddy month, and muddy only by inches, given how feet-deep the ground had frozen by winter’s nadir and how slow any thaw in any year.

And snow, in Aprils then, was still the not-unexpected stranger at the door. In fact, our youngest son was born on an April 17th, during a night softened by eight inches of snow, a snowfall that slowed the midwives and made their one-hour trip north, two, but still in time. And Mother’s Day, one year, yes, Mother’s Day in the middle of a month wanting to be May, itself dawned to eight inches of snow, although by then, by anyone’s reckoning, winter’s back was surely broken, and that particular snowfall, doomed at the outset, little more than fertilizer.

In April, in Vermont, no one would ever mow a lawn, not unless there were some question of sanity.

April was a month to be enjoyed for the temptation it was, and undoubtedly still is there—the odd day warming to 50 degrees; the night again reminding you of winter; the road ruts, warmed in the day’s sunlight, freezing again overnight and, in the chill of morning, claiming the odd water pump (our car’s, one year) or exhaust system, only for the wrong choice of a rut. And any snow then was short-lived, blanketing, only momentarily beautifying, with the writing already on the sky: the days longer, the nights less, any chance of any snow lingering for hours, let alone days, increasingly just that, a chance.

Spring when it came, when it truly came, was a gift and, almost always, languorous; no all-at-once pushing-90, no instant lawns, no mowers robbing this, or any, April evening of the peace April has earned and deserves.

What I remember, instead, was one day only gently warmer than the day before, spring greening the landscape by leaf and branch, a green barely green, its shimmer pilfered from an impressionist’s palette, a green which, as it deepened, melted the winter that had been.

And sometime, maybe May, more likely June, the need to mow.