Casting about

As I sit at my computer, I find myself nearing the end of the tenth day of the month. Yes, indeed, April is one-third over, and, until this moment, I've written only blog entry for the month.

And it's curious. Looking over statistics for the past three years, I note that I've written an average of only 4.67 posts during each April, compared with an overall average of 7.75 posts per month for those three years as a whole. To you, my occasional readers, these statistics may be of little interest -- you may, in fact, be already preparing to click over to your favorite gardening blog -- but I pore over these figures with the same puzzled fascination that a young baseball fan lavishes on ERA's and batting statistics.

I scratch my head, but can't think of any unusual feature about the month of April that would account for my low authorial productivity. I've already used up, in earlier posts, my only two literary insights into the mysteries of the month: "April is the cruelest month" and

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, etc. etc. etc.

Granted, these are highly satisfying quotations and, I'm convinced, quite meaningful when taken in proper context. But this hardly seems the context.

I suppose I might appeal to the schoolboy's excuse of spring fever. Or to the schoolboy's joke: "I just got finished with a march of 31 days." (Yuk, yuk.) Or I might consider the fact that each year in March I do celebrate in print the anniversary of my blog: perhaps April finds me exhausted after the excesses of those revels, the sheer Dionysian abandon with which I indulge myself?

I don't know. I just don't know. But I do know that I'll somehow manage more than the (now) two posts that I've been able to accomplish to date.

Meanwhile, there's one more popular allusion to April, perhaps less literary than those by Eliot and Chaucer, but nevertheless containing some allegorical truth: "April showers bring May flowers." Let's pretend that while the soil of my brain lies relatively fallow throughout April, seeds are being planted that will spring to life in works of great art by next month.

"Yes, isn't it pretty to think so," as one of my fellow writers once wrote.