A crocus in the time of the Coronavirus

T.S. Eliot famously called April the cruelest month. He did not live in Minnesota.

I do, and I would say that April is the most erratic month. Mercurial? Might one assign a diagnostic category to thirty calendar days of the year? Yes? Shape-shifting disorder, then.

Decades ago, recently married and eager to expand our small house in Minneapolis, my husband and I began our renovation. Built around 1900, the place was charming. But at less than a thousand square feet, it was cramped. To claim more living space, we decided to insulate and enclose our front porch. We planned throughout the winter. A small investment in parquet tiles, sheetrock, studs, and windows would give us a space that would be intimate in winter and welcoming in summer. We were avid fans of “This Old House.” We knew how to drop a plumb line. We understood r-values. Drawings and measurements covered our dining room table. My husband was skilled at carpentry. No need to hire anyone. “Sweat equity” was our mantra.

He ripped out the original sagging joists and bowed floorboards on April tenth. Pushing our luck, maybe. But with our tax refund in hand and the snowbanks finally gone, it was impossible to wait. Over many trips to Knox Lumber and back, sheets of plywood and drywall tied precariously to the roof of our Pinto, we had accumulated our supplies. Sawdust filled the air. On the 14th, he left his tools where they’d be handy, and went to bed early, exhausted.

Waking the next morning to a house twenty degrees colder than normal, I rushed downstairs. Speechless, I watched as he unearthed his electric drill, circular saw, reciprocating saw and router from beneath a foot of snow. I will never forget the frozen, stunned look on his face. Were the tools still usable? Did we have to dip into our meagre savings to replace them? I can’t remember, but I’m sure he does.

Forty years later, we are still in the process of renovating our second house, in St. Paul. No matter that we’ve redone the bathroom twice, the kitchen four times, added a garage and two decks, a study, a den, a loft. We’ve stripped every single piece of the woodwork the previous owners had covered with paint so impenetrable you’d think it was made to withstand re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. We’ve re-plumbed and re-roofed, added a sidewalk and patio and pond, a second bathroom, a sauna. Made a tranquil garden out of a wasteland of a yard. Every year, when April arrives and the snowbanks disappear, we start another project. We take that chance.

I have never forgotten the look on my husband’s face that morning, decades ago, when I found him standing in a foot of snow, staring at his power tools. It’s an image that still resonates. Maybe it is what drives us, after forty years of marriage, to begin a project every spring. In April.

This April we have other things occupying our mind and attention. Our world is buried not in snow but in terrible uncertainty. No one saw the pandemic coming. Just as I did not anticipate that of the dozens of crocus bulbs I’ve planted over the years, only a single one would ever bloom. That it would bloom this year, in April. During this scary, cruel, erratic, mercurial, shape-shifting time, it’s a small thing.

I’ll take it.