I’ve never liked April.

It started when I was a schoolchild and we had an April week off, called Mud Week. This was long before Quality Time had ever been heard of, so parents didn’t feel guilty if they didn’t take the entire family on some special vacation. Walt Disney World hadn’t been invented then, either. In fact, the very idea of “taking a vacation” and going somewhere else besides home was a pretty foreign concept to most of us.

April was just like any other part of the year, and having a week off from school was just a nuisance.

Fathers were going to work (Take Your Kids to Work Day would have been thought an extremely outlandish idea) and mothers were doing what they did every day, deciding what to have for supper or if the clothes would get dry if she hung them on the line. And, of course, at my house there were several children milling around, bored out of their minds. Or so we thought. Mom always offered up a list of things we could do but nothing really appealed to us.

I hated April then, especially Mud Week, because I would have rather been in school where my friends were and where there was always something to do. Something I called fun, which was really schoolwork.

By the time I became a mother – and a working, single mother at that – April was a time for me to feel guilty because I couldn’t afford to take a week off and take my son to Disney World, like “all the other kids.” For people like me, that week-off meant the usual daycare was closed, a babysitter had to be found and changes made to accommodate Mud Week – or as it was now called, Spring Break. April wasn’t something we looked forward to.

We all lived through that trauma and just as I settled nicely into retirement, Mother Nature has decided that April will become a test month. April will be used for testing the resilience of humans to have 50 degree temperatures and sunshine one day and then a foot of snow the next day.

This year, my long-handled shovel, propped against the side of the house, fell down during the warm spell we had – and of course then we got 16 inches of snow. I could have used a metal detector to locate the shovel, but lots of hand digging got it out. I blame this on April.

March used to be like April is nowadays. March was when the “surprise” snowstorms came, but April was just a muddy, mucky mess made bearable only because it was when you could find violets and blu-its and trillium on the muddy banking, alongside the ice cold brook.

Looking at the pile of snow on the ground outside my window, and watching the trees dance in the wind makes me wonder if this is a big joke and it’s really still March. I doubt there are any violets under that snow. The robins and yellow finches sitting in the sumac trees are totally stunned. It must be March.

But no, the calendar (and my computer) say it’s April – time for taxes, planning for Alumni Banquet, time to clean and open the Historical Society, to fill in the holes in the driveway; time to sort through clothes and clean closets. Maybe if we get busy enough, the snow will magically melt, the weatherman will go to Disney World and we can get on with spring – or what’s left of it.

I’m pretty sure if things don’t change radically, come May, we might actually have Mud Week, with lots of real mud.

See you next week.