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On renewal and rebirth
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On renewal and rebirth
  Let’s talk about April. No, not her. This isn’t a gossip column. I mean the month. April is widely viewed as a month of renewal. The main reasons being, of course, spring and Easter.  The first day of spring comes in March. In many places, you begin to see signs of it in April. Of course if you live here, you’re lucky if it isn’t already summer by April. Easter usually comes in April, although once in a while it’s in late March. Easter makes people think of renewal and rebirth. It also makes me think of scratchy petticoats, stiff dresses, shiny new shoes and ham. We all know April showers bring May flowers. It also brings more deadly weather, like the tornadoes that killed people and flattened homes in Arkansas and Tennessee. In nature, as in life, renewal is hard, and sometimes violent. April is National Poetry Month. In “The Waste Land,” TS Eliot wrote, “April is the cruellest month,” a line many people know and quote. But if you read more:  “April is the cruellest month, breeding you may conclude that Eliot was saying, much more eloquently than I did, that all this renewal and rebirth and change is hard, and scary, and uncomfortable. It makes you hope, and hope can lead to heartbreak.  The message of renewal is everywhere in April—the covers of women’s magazines are packed with this message, represented in articles about getting your body ready for swimsuit season and spring cleaning. There’s much renewal going on this April. Winter is dying hard in a lot of places, but it appears to be loosening its grip. The economy is showing tiny glimmers of new life. Baseball has started.  And into the middle of all this renewal and rebirth comes the income tax filing deadline. Remember when I said hope can lead to heartbreak? It occurred to me that maybe April’s message of renewal is why the government made April 15 the income tax filing deadline. In a grimmer month—February, say—it might be more than we could bear. It turns out, though, that there really is no good reason for the deadline being April 15. The first deadline, in 1913, was March 1. In 1918 it was changed to March 15 because there were delays in getting the forms printed. This was popular with journalists everywhere, because they got to use “Ides of March” in thousands of headlines.  In 1955, the deadline was changed to April 15, to ease the burden of tax employees: It seems that everyone was filing their returns at the last possible minute, making March 15 and the weeks afterward a nightmare for the people who had to process all the returns. The government moved the deadline back a month to give its tax employees a break from last-minute filers. It may have worked, that one year. Now we all file at the last minute a month later than we did in 1954. Having caught on to human nature after that, the government declined to keep moving the deadline back a month each year, and just stuck with April 15.  Which gives journalists the chance to use “April is the cruellest month” in millions of headlines, so that’s OK. If this column has a point, and not all of them do, it is that even though bad things continue to happen all around the world, we can still take advantage of this month’s message of renewal and rebirth and hope.  Nowhere can you see these messages more clearly than in your backyard. Go take a look, and ponder the fact that we are not so different from the trees sending out tender new shoots after our long sleep. We don’t know what will happen next—beautiful sunny days and warm rains or drought and destructive storms. We only know this is the time to start again, to grow, and to hope.  |
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