Final Reflections on April 2013

“April is the cruelest month.”

So begins The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot. It happens to be one of my all-time favorite poems. And, sadly, the opening line felt all too appropriate for April 2013.

I’m not going to tell you how I feel about the Boston Marathon bombings. Enough has been said already, and much of it by people more eloquent than me. Suffice it to say that I don’t feel anything different than what most people have felt about it. It was a terrible tragedy.

As keenly as I felt the bombings, however, I was even more devastated by the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. Proximity might have something to do with it. West is only an hour or so down the freeway from where I live. I’ve driven through it multiple times on my way to Austin and back.

It’s more than that though. As awful as Boston was, West was an even bigger tragedy, in my opinion. More people died, for one. Half the town was destroyed, for another. And the biggest employer for the area is gone now, probably for good. How is West to recover from that? Even worse, it was entirely preventable. If the people who owned and operated the West Fertilizer Co. had simply followed the safety regulations, the explosion likely wouldn’t have happened.

Where is the outrage for this story? I feel it. I want to know the names of the people responsible for this. I want them to face criminal charges. I want it to be all over the news. But news isn’t news in America any longer. It’s entertainment. And I think that makes me angrier than anything.

Even closer to home, my brother sent me four boxes of old family photos in April. You can read a little bit more about that here if you’re interested. When I finished going through the first box, my husband asked me if I was happy to finally have my family’s stuff. The question struck me as odd. I wasn’t happy. At the time, I felt sad, but later it morphed into something more like bittersweet.

Looking through this stuff can be painful. Nearly everyone in these pictures is dead now. Many of them, I never got a chance to know at all. Many more, I never got around to knowing as well as I should have. And to me, that’s sad. On the other hand, it’s been fascinating to learn more about the lives of my maternal grandparents, who are largely a mystery to me. One night, after flipping through a scrapbook of my grandmother’s, it suddenly occurred to me how alike we were. Most of the scrapbook was made up of bits of poetry that she’d collected, works that had touched her or that she had enjoyed. I used to collect poetry too when I was about the same age (early 20s).

Suddenly, I felt connected to her, in a way that I never had before. It was a good feeling, one that I cherish.

So April wasn’t all bad. We saw a good turn in our financial situation, which we’re capitalizing on. With diligence, I think the husband and I will be largely debt free within a couple of years. And while I still haven’t been writing, I did start revising a previous manuscript. The husband and I came up with a plan for publishing. I’m working toward implementing it, but I’ll talk more about that next month, when I’ll hopefully have more to report.

All in all, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been feeling pretty philosophical this month. In Texas, the weather has been a little wild: 80 degrees one day, 50 the next. It seems as though the rest of life has mirrored this: one day a national tragedy, the next personal triumph. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster, but I’m not interested in getting off of it any time soon.

That’s April 2013 in a nutshell and that’s what’s been on my mind. If you’re stopping by to read, why don’t you tell me what’s been on yours?