An April Rhapsody.

This evening’s twilight finally gave me a taste of April as it should be – dull and damp, but mild and with hardly a breath of breeze.

There’s actually no such thing as a perfect April, of course, but it’s how I remember it from back in the day when I was a rookie photographer honing my observation of the seasons and the natural world. It was the month when I most enjoyed taking my dog for rambles along the lanes, across the fields and through the newly greening woods.

I was living in another village then, about twenty miles from here, and there was a tree-fringed hollow in one of the fields where I used to sit among the wild primroses while dear Em ran off her boundless energy to her heart’s content. In fact, I can honestly say that I’d never really noticed primroses before, nor their association with the quiet splendour of mid-spring as long as the weather gods are feeling benevolent. I set one of my stories in that very place, and in this very month, and with characters based on people I knew well there. It’s called The Gypsy Rover if anyone should care to read it, but be warned: The dénouement is as enigmatic as April is; it’s for the reader to play god and determine the solution.

So this evening I went out and stood at the edge of my little porch, there to luxuriate in the heady atmosphere as the gloaming gathered. To smell the earth and feel the touch of dampness on my face; to see the near-glowing greens at their greenest; to drink in the sense that here, to my perception, is the closest we come to a deeper meaning of life.