In April she came!

By Jing Villamil

 

THIS month is most confusing. And not only because it opens with April Fools’ Day, the odd pranksters’ holiday. Each of its days is a study in pleasant/unpleasant contradictions, and endearing but sometimes heart-stopping surprises.

Take the weather. Today it is sunny and warm; tomorrow, it is rainy and wet, gusty winds and lightnings. Aside from the weather, there is the question of the source of its name. The Greeks claim April was named after their goddess of love, Aphrodite. Yet, to the Romans, April is Aprilis, which means “to open”, when trees and flowers begin to green and bloom, and streams swell and flow.

To add to the confusion, April is ruled by two Zodiac animal signs – four-legged, horned and hooved. Those born March19-April 19 are under the sign of Aries the Ram, a Sun sign ruled by the Roman God of War, Mars. On the other hand, those born April 20-May 20 are under Taurus the Bull, an Earth sign ruled by the Roman goddess of love, Venus. The god of war and the goddess of love sharing one bed, one blanket?

It is also birthmonth to geniuses, artists, writers, poets. And despots. Famous of whom: Leonardo da Vinci, William Wordsworth, Noah Webster. And Adolf Hitler!

One does not even have to be born in April to fall under its puzzling spell:

“April come she will, when streams are ripe and swelled in rain.” The famed folk-rock duo of the 1960’s Simon and Garfunkel went on to immortalize this girl who chose to come in the spring of April, and who stayed in this boy’s “arms again” until May. (Again? This was not her first time to stay in his arms for two months?)

In June, she changed her tune. She walked restlessly during the nights. She must be a prowler at heart and from the very start. She could not have stayed cozy and quiet in the boy’s arms for two months and suddenly began prowling in the third month!

She took flight in July without warning, without telling him why she was leaving and where she was going. Prowling the nights was not enough warning? Maybe she should have worn wooden clogs with nails for soles to “ngilo- ngipin” on concrete and flagstones; that would have been warning enough!

Disgusted, Simon and Garfunkel decided to write/sing her off “in August die she must” when the wind blew chilly na cold pa. The song ends in September with the boy so forlorn remembering “a love once new has now grown old”. Wait a minute, wait decades even. How can she who had flown away in July and had died in August can still have time to grow old?

Clear the head, come down to earth. If the girl in the song had lived during this coronavirus pandemic pandemonium – one imagines she would be prowling restlessly only the area within the boyfriend’s house the yard, all the days the nights. There would not be any getting out the gate up the fences; to the streets from the barangay out the town!

If she came in April, it would be the first month going on to the second of the lockdown. She would be a person under suspicious monitoring(PUM). Level this up to a person under merciless investigation (PUI) if she came from somewhere with COVID-19 positive or mortality cases!

But, really, I have met April a month before I was born. April is “witch hazels”, the harbinger of a life beginning. It is life renewing itself.

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