You can try again.
Here in the gentle rains of April, nothing is more assured than this simple truth.
There is no better time than spring to endure and push past our old failures, to forget their shame but not their lessons. They were the failures of the season prior, the failures of a long winter. Now is the season to reincarnate, to consider your past iteration, to begin anew. The first rains of April come and bring a tonal shift in the season. First, we acknowledged the early stirrings of spring in the belly of February. We then trudged through the muck and mire against the wicked winds of March toward the spring equinox. Now April is half passed and with it, the soft rains arrive. The first warm sunny day in spring brings riotous joy but the first rainy day brings redemption. All the vestiges of old snow at the edges of the forest that cannot be touched by the sun do not survive the rain. The rains arrive and melt whatever snow is left on the periphery: in the hedgerows, on the shaded slope behind the wood shed, and in the piles of scraped road left behind by the town plow. A weight lifted. Along with the snow, the good rains of April cleanse whatever cold vestiges of winter were clinging to your weathered, snow-bowed shoulders. This can include our regrets, our shortcomings, our resolutions forgotten by the roadside with the coltsfoot and dogwood.
April’s rain is not a biting, sleeting, stinging March rain that threatens to turn to hail and to snow. At the same time, it is not the merry rains of June in which we can bathe they are so warm. It is neither those nor the gorging autumn rains that threaten to flood the river valleys. As the naturalist Hal Borland observed, “One can walk in April rain, satisfied with the rightness of the world.” April rains are gentle, benevolent, and they do not wear out their welcome. They are evocative in that they evoke — they call forth — grass and buds and new birds. The maple trees have revealed their young red leaves, a tease of what is to come mid-September. The hills are alight with new green grass and the haze of budding poplar. The purple finches and northern flickers can be seen in the fields and pastures, their rampant colors exotic to the New England eye. They do not receive the same fanfare as the robins or bluebirds but they are heralds of the good green pattern reemerging just as any other.
We can walk in an April rain and note how spring lends itself well to thoughts of endurance, resiliency, and stoicism. We see the flowers bloom, get crushed by snow, and thrive without complaint. The forest floor is bare now, free of the tyranny of snow or midsummer’s chaos of unfurled fiddlehead fern. There, in the leaf litter and pine duff, we can see which trees take root in stone, caring not for their ill fortune or the unseen hand that placed their seed on barren ground. They just grow. So too the bluebirds who emerge from their claimed nesting box as if the storms of our capricious spring never occurred. They twitter about, caring not for the blizzards that befell them only a week ago. We too can endure all the little hardships of our lives, the hard ground we are granted and the bitter storms by which we are battered.
We too can carry on, brush off, and try again.
The drizzle gave way to a beautiful sunny morning here, and everything is starting over.
Hopeful. 🌞