So pricketh them Nature in their courages

T.S. Eliot tells us that April is the cruelest month, but Chaucer contends that when April with its showers sweet the drought of March has pierced to the root and bathed every vein in such liquor of which vertu engendred is the flower--in other words, when all those April showers make spring begin again, then folk like you and me long to go on pilgrimages. And so I did--not to Canterbury but to my woods, where April showers have brought out May flowers by the bushel.

We found mayapples and violets and stonecrop and fire pinks, and in a spot where the power company cleared out some trees last fall we found a mature lilac bush blooming. We've lived here seven years without ever knowing lilacs grew back there. Along the driveway we saw plenty of pawpaw blossoms, so tiny and velvety brown that they don't look like flowers at all unless you're right up close. Up in the pine grove I found an interesting fungus, and right up at the top of the hill I found a plucky late trillium poking its head out from beneath dead leaves and fallen trees.

That's me, I told myself, trying to blossom through the weathered and wearying detritus of life. My April would have been much less wretched if I'd spent more time in the woods and less in the office, but I was sick and busy and surrounded by people who needed things and the rain kept falling and falling and falling and so I stayed in my office and worked and sulked and forgot about the woods and the trillium and the indigo buntings.

But now it's time to put April behind me. It's a whole new day, a whole new month! Today I'll turn in final grades and wash my hands of this semester, and tomorrow I'll hand over a pile of faculty governance files to my successor. The cruelest month is over! Now it's time to bloom.