april is the cruellest month

it has thirty days in it

Members of the 30 Day Yoga Challenge Group Chat,

I’m giving [redacted]’s Yoga Challenge another shot. It’s mostly, though, for a client.

My husband has just had his tenth surgery post-[redacted] and it seems to be taking.

He decided that he would hobby grow bulbs—

I’ve always thought that lilacs were bulbs, but they are shrubs, like the shrubbery of my home turf.

Chapparal: what covers the city park that I drive by beside two dumps on my way to the ocean, not quite getting there—

—out of locally produced compost that quickly becomes dead land, breeding memory in this snowless land.

In April, the cruellest month—that my husband doesn’t even know the Wasteland—we almost share a birthday. It’s one of the ways that we’ve made a family, overwriting what’s historically been the worst day of the year for me with days we share, joyfully.

363 days out of the year, neither of us is very good at sharing (though he is better than me). Two days in April we get it right. This leap year three, our second together.

Maybe we should measure the depth of relationships in leap-year cycles and other astronomical events. He and I have shared another: the annular eclipse.

There’s thirty days in April and so far in 2024 I’ve forgotten the hedonic leisure of trusting someone to tell me what to do with myself for 17 to 30 minutes out of 1440 in a day. I can’t even give myself over to someone for 60 minutes without thinking what I should be charging.

Anyway, I’m doing a yoga challenge in April. I’ll be posting my thoughts in the chat. I’ll be soliciting others to check in with me daily regarding the tough pleasures they cajoled themselves into having and felt grateful for afterwards. Maybe not just yoga—remember, it’s really just breathing and moving—it could be afternoon napping or chatting with a neighbor or eating lunch in the sunshine, even though it’s chilly because it’s lovely to be outside for now.

For now.

And afterwards, on May 1, I’m going to start to listening to Foucault’s Pendulum.

hopefully leisurely,

AE