As Eliot wrote, April is the cruelest month

April, somewhere distant, spring fading while summer still is just out of reach. Right out of a Paul Simon lyric, “April, come she will, when streams are ripe and swelled with rain.” Those of you my age will remember, and hearing the song in your head will likely make you a little sad. And consider the first line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” wherein he says, “April is the cruelest month … mixing memory and desire.” He does offer some hope but suggests that our desires will never, in the end, be truly fulfilled. I hope some of our poets found joy in their lives, though some days it sure doesn’t feel like it. Or maybe I’m just reading the wrong poets, or listening to the wrong music. Or possibly we need poets and philosophers to help us with what we do not know, or people we do not understand.

A few days ago, I awoke at dawn, trundled across the hallway to the bathroom in that way that elderly men do, and glanced out of the window toward the woods behind the house. In the half light of morning, something extremely large was moving along my drive, and I quickly put on a pair of glasses to see something astonishing. A huge tom turkey was strutting about, all alone, tail feathers fanned out behind him, larger than life. I’ve never seen one so large. Evidently this sort of behavior is what male turkeys do to attract females. I didn’t see any other turkeys around, so perhaps he was just practicing, like a young man in front of a mirror in his parents’ house, practicing the words he’ll use to ask a classmate on a date. I wished him well.

Speaking of wildlife, there are new tenants in my hollow: badgers! I saw the burrows recently and thought nah, those weren’t made by badgers, then a neighbor showed me a photo of a mother badger and her two little ones in his front yard. Oh my. The turkeys around here might want to be cautious, maybe carry a gun or a taser.

Speaking of wild things, recently I met a feral tortoiseshell cat named, you’ll love this, “Kitty.” Friends of mine live high on a bluff above the Mississippi River, and Kitty had been hanging about and, after much coaxing, she’ll now come into the friends’ house during the day and spend a bit of time there before going back to the wild. On a recent visit, I was told that when Kitty saw me, she’d likely take off. She was, after all, a wild animal, not one to make my acquaintance, or anyone else’s. Ha! I haven’t even begun to understand human bonds, but I can relate to cats. A friend said it best when she saw the photo …“That photo is happiness!” She understands me.

It’s getting late in life, and there is so much I’ve yet to see, to understand, so it may be time to skip what is already known, time to load up my cameras, give myself an assignment, and take to the road. My last photo exhibit took me from small towns in Iowa to the streets of Chicago, and it was an extraordinary experience. Perhaps it’s time to get back out there, introduce myself to questions that can’t be answered, to people I’ll never see again, and write a little poetry in a notebook that will be true, hopeful, and never read by anyone but me. Right now, I’m a little tired, tired of an April that cannot define itself as anything other than cruel. I’ll wait a few weeks, maybe in May or June. Perhaps I’ll see you out there.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald has published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here.