Where did April go? After a bright and warmish start, the Spring in April just seemed to fizzle out; long and dreary days followed, one after the other. My body, craving sunlight and temperatures above 30 degrees, protested in the usual way, by ramping up it’s arthritic/fibromyalgic responses. April, like the Winter before it, became all about pain management.

The one lovely thing about April, though, was that Mother Nature was still busy allowing her blossoms to bloom: forsythia, daffodils, and lily of the valley made their usual exuberant entrances, on time and so joyful. Almost all the bulbs I had planted last Fall seemed to have survived the marauding squirrels who had been watching me so closely as I worked to bury bulbs as deeply as was wise. It was hard not to absorb some of their good cheer, cold and grey as it was.

Of especial delight this year, were the crops of dandelions that sprung up, willy nilly, all over the place – joyous punctuations in the green grass. Last year, I harvested most of them to make dandelion wine, meant to be had when the “first snow flies” – which we did indeed enjoy. This year, I am happy to leave them be, to simply enjoy their presence, and their reminder that warmer days lie ahead.

Dandelion by Ted Kooser

The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions

is this single kernel of bright yellow

dropped on our path by the sun, sensing

that we might need some marker to help us

find our way through life, to find a path

over the snow-flattened grass that was

blade by blade unbending into green,

on a morning early in April, this happening

just at the moment I thought we were lost

and I’d stopped to look around, hoping

to see something I recognized. And there

it was, a commonplace dandelion, right

at my feet, the first to bloom, especially

yellow, as if pleased to have been the one,

chosen from all the others, to show us the way.