Welcome to April, the month of the optimist! This one is for the rest of you.
If you can pull your eyes off that 24/7 screen of doom, take a look out your window. Something out there is blooming while you're festering. Those dull gray hillsides are shading into greens. You've sat around and missed the Bradfords, and the red buds have about peaked.
Yes, I know, we're surrounded by the plague. I get it. There's plenty to worry about.
But while you're watching another headcount bulletin, the season is changing. Winter fades to spring in April. It's the month of rebirth and the time for planting. There's nothing more optimistic than putting seeds in the ground with visions of summer salads in July.
I only have to look next door for a reminder. The neighbors have started a little plot of vegetables in the backyard. I watched Meat with a hoe last week busting up about a six foot square of ground. Tater came along after with a hand tiller to dress thing up.
It was good to see Meat outside in a good mood. He was a little whiney when Prater beat him to the first legal six pack in town. But he's over it now. Amazing what a great woman and a little digging can do for a guy.
All I know is it's a good thing Andy waited until this week to shut down the borders. Otherwise, half of Elkhorn would be in quarantine over beer trips across the state line. It's flying off the Double Kwik shelves faster than toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
So as the news keeps getting worse around us, as the realities of a world-wide pandemic blur our senses, it is most important that we keep an April attitude. We might be entering the hardest month any of us have faced, but we cannot stop looking beyond.
I'm not literally growing a garden, but I am following my own optimist path. For the last two summers, I've produced a ten week free music series in Whitesburg. We've brought hundreds of people together through free live concerts from some of the finest performers in the world.
We received the grant to do it again this year. To make it happen requires planning months in advance and the planning for this year began long before anyone put corona and virus together.
This is the week we were scheduled to announce the lineup for the Levitt AMP Whitesburg Music Series and that is what we did. The plan is to have the first show at the end of May and run every week into August.
It doesn't matter that these plans will almost certainly change, that shows will be postponed and some likely cancelled. We've accepted that. Do we really think things will be back to normal in June? No we don't, but we'll be ready when they are.
Things will be back to normal eventually. We will be able to gather in churches, in bars, and in outdoor spaces celebrating. This is the month for making plans, planting gardens and looking ahead.
They didn't teach you April showers bring May flowers in kindergarten for nothing.