April Again

I started writing this last April (2016) and never published it.  I'm going to go ahead and publish it now, because it's actually not a bad piece of writing (if I do say so myself) and because I've been terrible at keeping up here...so here it is...stay tuned for "what I read" later this week and garden updates (as soon as it stops snowing...)

April is a Bittersweet month.

It's the month of Columbine and Oklahoma City...when I spend way too much time running through believable and unbelievable scenarios in my mind about my school, and my kids' schools, and the world in general. It's when I realize that the families and survivors of Oklahoma City and Columbine have lived entire lifetimes since they lost their family members, their friends, their children, their parents....Children have grown up and had children of their own. 

It's the month of 420, when schools seem to battle the entire month...saying, "Yes marijuana is legal for people over 21 but not for you and not in school." 

It's springtime, and it's snow storms...writing and rewriting lesson plans, trying to decide what is most important to keep and what can be discarded with dwindling days left in the school year. Its days of crossing fingers that we have a snow day, and days of crossing fingers that we don't (and the roads are good enough to get to school in a timely manner!)

it's remembering all the crazy things that we did in college during Grand Prix week and missing those friends, then calling them on early Saturday mornings ,and late Thursday nights... and chatting or emailing or texting. And getting phone calls from college roommates who are taking their kids on "final" college visits and talking for an hour in my bathroom, because my family is sleeping, while she sits in a parking lot...laughing, sniffling, and remembering... and planning for "when all the kids are in college, we'll.....".....

April is when I think about Rwanda and the genocide there,  and how quickly things can go so badly in a place where they shouldn't have gone badly at all. A country that wasn't THAT different from ours...Which takes me into imagining the zombie apocalypse and "do we have enough canned water in the pantry?" 

It's when I start my garden and then it snows 24 inches in 24 hours...you'd think I'd learn...every year. Every year.  (Ha!  Edit, late March 31, 2017...this year I have a greenhouse! Ha!)

It's the end of the school year when the kids and the teachers are all raw and ready to move on, but we're not quite done yet.  All of our emotions are right at the surface, feelings get hurt, and we snap at each other, and then we laugh, and then we cry, and then we laugh some more and just keep moving forward.....

It's April again and that's just how it is.  It's a beginning..... and an ending..... it's just April.