April is the Cruellest Month

I woke up this morning to hear the phrase "April is the cruellest month" and it rang a familiar chord.  The radio personalities (isn't that a funny thing to call them?) went on to say that the weather was nasty.  I guess that is why April is a cruel month - the weather teases you. It was -4 with a wind chill making it seem like -12.  I jumped out of bed and pulled up my blinds.  A light dusting of white snow was covering just about everything.  I crawled back in bed.   

It was a cold walk into work this morning but not as bad as we have had in the 5 or 6 months previously.  Somehow the same temperatures and wind chill you get in April does not seem as miserable as when it arrives in November.  We might all complain about April snow showers but we know that "the snow won't last".  May is just around the corner and so the May flowers and for sure warmer temps – at least in Toronto.  In short, I don't care if it is nasty.  Spring is here even if winter is trying to remind us that it doesn't leave voluntarily.


The roads and sidewalks were slick, no doubt because
folks have a hard time justifying salting ice and shovelling snow when they know that it will be gone the next day.  So I had to walk a bit more carefully, but all and all it wasn't a bad walk in.  It was much worse the other day in the pouring rain and a few degrees warmer.  Again, only because I know it will not last.  By the weekend it will be warming up.  For sure!  And it is a long weekend as well!  I am happy.

I decided to look up that quote that I had heard on the radio and this is what I found:

 

"April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."  T.S. Eliot from The Wasteland (Pt 1).

Incidentally, I discovered that cruellest can be spelled with one or two l's.  The quote is spelled with two, I guess as written in his book, but the spell checks don't like it, so I looked it up in the dictionary and it shows both spellings as correct. Interesting language English is,eh?

T.S. Eliot was an American author and poet and a winner of a Nobel prize for literature.  A very interesting fellow and possibly a subject of a future blog!  Decided I need to put one or two of his works on my "must read" list.

 I also found the following quote which I think is a good reminder that there is that annual stipend to figure out and we get to find out whether we owe or pay.

The quote: "Isn't it appropriate that the month of the tax begins with April Fool's Day and ends with cries of "May Day!?" was not attributed to anyone on the web site I found it, but it sounded good none the less.

 April is also the month I get my Collingwood property back.  April 12^th is the last day it is tenanted, which is Sunday.  The following weekend my parents get back from Florida and take up residence there.  So I guess I really don't get it "back", although I get to go up and visit it now and again.  I will go up the weekend following and make sure all is well, but probably won't go up too much while the folks are living there.  It is hard to live with parents after you have been out of the nest for over 30 years.

 

A short blog today – lots of stuff keeping me busy!