Oh, April! You’re such a tempest. Teasing us with your loving and sensuous heat for a blessed moment before abruptly becoming frigid and distant. You bring warmth so satisfying and with such depth that our inner souls are soothed with comfort. Then, just as we were so nearly seduced you turned the other shoulder to show us a side of you so unwelcoming, so cold and distant we considered hiding.

What were we to do? There isn’t an answer. So we simply sat back and allowed your split personality to waver, to enjoy the momentary warming tease before you choose to freeze us away. This is quite a ride! 

Ah, yes. Those beautiful rays of sunshine that gave way to pelting rains and occasional snow. No boredom, my dear. None at all. You wavered from one moment to the next, from day to day. You brought us purplish pasque flowers on a gray day on a brown hill. So uplifting. So early. A few days later we met before dawn as the sun began to peek over this gnarly, long forgotten ridged bank of the Glacial River Warren, forever unplowed and strewn with rocks set free by the ancient icy river. 

You actually gave off an appealing glow of warmth and happiness, offering us prairie flowers quite tiny and delicate though we’ve long known their toughness and persistence, of how they harken for spring before the other native forbs. How warming to the inner soul. On days like this, April, you remind us of naturalist and author Hal Borland who suggested “April is a promise May is bound to keep.” In a word, you give us hope. Then, as suddenly, you tried hiding all this soft bluish-violetness with whiteness. Cold and shivering whiteness.

Yet, dear April, you remind us of certain promises. One with a fly rod, or any fishing rod, with that familiar tug on the end of the line. Bluegills in the bay; Blue Bells in the woods! Bluish-gray Great Blue Herons wading in the shallows just weeks after ice out, lifting off at the slightest fear. Promises of pasque flowers and delicate blue daisies. Of nesting birds working feverishly to prepare for the future of their species. Of dark blue skies rising in the West that suggest a hopeful gentle rain, one that magically allows green to emerge in the turf. Of lilac leaves stretching away from spindly branches, and that reddish tint sparkling in the nearby woodlands and prairie riverbanks as buds venture forth. 

With all this promise we tend to overlook the occasional flecks of snow, or the cold, wind-driven rain. Those happen, too. Some days we may initially don down coats, hoodies and even insulated pants before switching to shorts and a tee shirt by mid-afternoon. Galway-like days, always ever-changing with an atmospheric weather of  absolute confusion. Borland, author and son of the Nebraska and Colorado plains and prairie, offered this: “The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren’t written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.”

Indeed!

You gave us sunrises late enough for an old man to see, with sunsets glowing in both pastel and vividness well before bedtime. All that color alive in the sky; all that spring poetry, and yes, none of it on paper. Winter has passed us, though those random flecks of snow on a gray and chilly day serve as a too-recent reminder. Spring showers bring a greenness to inspire, yet it’s those gorgeous sunny days that are the best. Warmth without the heat and humidity of summer. Another promise!

With your warmth we watch a pilgrimage to the greenhouses and farm fields. Another promise. As I write this my neighboring farmer whose commodity crop field abuts our Listening Stones Farm prairie is hard at work with spring tillage. I must take note of the your sunrises, the shape and feel of the horizon to remember in the heat of summer. Yes, April, you remind us of horizons with those moments of rapidly changing color; color in the coming and in the going. The sunrise. The sunset.

This morning you gave us a perfectly splendid prairie sunrise with just enough clouds stretching across our prized horizon to give the rising sun a stage perfect for a performance that would be cliche if not for those too many mornings when you offered us only an overcast grayness. This is when you allow us to enjoy this marriage between horizon and prairie as a magnificent bonding experience. “As a mountain is high, a prairie is wide; a horizontal grandeur, not vertical,” wrote the late essayist, Bill Holm. Indeed. 

Oh, April! Your mornings, long past the Equinox and headed steadfastly toward the Summer Solstice, are the clues of an awakening of the natural world. This we’ll give you as you stretch your arms and yank back the covers on another spring. Unlike March, which is the blinking of the eyes after months of sleep, you are an awakening that now becomes serious ­— sometimes calmly, sometimes anything but. A tempest of both seduction and spite, all awaiting a calmness a calendar calls May.