April is a state of mind. Like age. She exists outside seasons and time, the strange little wormhole through which we must wiggle to get to the other side, where weather patterns even out and continue in a recognizable fashion, more or less. Summer, for example, is as predictable as old men and repetition of stories.
Snow, hail, short-sleeves and sandals. It all happens here in the year’s thirty days of adolescence -- angsty and conflicted about The Big Questions, as people say when they don’t want to name gods, political leanings or philosophical bends. Just nod and smile and get through dinner parties and Meeting the Parents. And April.
But the hormonal weather isn’t lost to binging on House of Cards or tying flies. That has already been done: watched and tied. Prepared and planed for, ready to take advantage of these so-called “bad days,” when the barometer falls and pike fishing turns on, just like it should. Just like the old wives say.
The forecast didn’t say anything about thunderstorms though. Rain and wind, absolutely. That was the whole point in the first place -- after a string of warm days that had everyone bee-lining to garden centers like women who start planning weddings and naming babies after first dates. All so premature. But it said nothing about the electricity now running down from the sky in sticks, lighting up the plains like a dance club. I could hear the beats, but had seen stars in my canyon’s black allotment of sky when we left in the small hours of morning when possibilities are big, when the coffee is strong. But with declining elevation, the weather did too. Which is what we were hoping for, what we had planned. Dreary and dismal, lulling other fishermen back to sleep and pulling the northerns up and in close to shore.
April, it seems, does have one predictable trait, after all.
