Nearly a century ago, the poet T.S. Elliot wrote a quite famous poem about April as the “cruelest month” of the year. I’ll leave it to literary experts to decipher exactly what he meant by that.
However, in more general terms, I think a cruel April is one that fails to live up to the high expectations we often have for this month as we get to the end of a long annual period of cool, wet weather.
After all, the calendar tells us April is the first full month of spring, although it might in reality be the last month of pre-spring (a.k.a. late winter).
The Gregorian calendar we’ve been stuck with for the past few centuries is the creation of a renaissance Roman Catholic pope who knew little about the weather, climate, and seasons beyond the confines of Mediterranean Europe.
The frequent disappointment with the “cruelest month” arises when late-winter or pre-spring weather lingers past the end of March and carries on until about mid-April in a normal year.
Worse still, in LaNina years like we’ve had in 2017 and 2018, the end of the wet season is even later, often lasting until nearly the very end of April.
These are the worst Aprils of all, and I think they provide most of the discontent. Their soaking showers can go on for hours and hours!
So if April is a cruel month when the weather resembles March for the most part, how prevalent have these wet starts to spring been over the years and how often do we get mainly nice weather during this volatile month by comparison?
A look back over the Chemainus weather records kept for the past quarter century indicate that April has been a “cruel” month a bit more often than a nice month, but not by much.
A lot of wet weather occurred at this time of year through the early and mid 1990s.
However from the late 1990s until the middle of this decade, April was either fairly dry or started off wet and dried out as the month progressed.
Ironically, though, one of the worst Aprils ever seen in the Chemainus Valley hit in 2008, right in the middle of this otherwise relatively benign period of years. It wasn’t particularly wet that month, but it was very cold with frost and even some persistent snow cover that lasted until the middle of the month.
So here we are now in the late part of the 2010 decade and wouldn’t you know it; we’ve fallen back into the pattern of mostly wet April weather again.
The cold April of 2008 was a one-off for the 2000 decade, but this is the second year in a row that we’ve had a “cruel” month at the beginning of our so-called spring season.
It appears to be part of a cooling trend in the weather that has also given the Chemainus Valley the back-to-back white Christmases I wrote about in this column at the beginning of the year.
We’ve also had unusually snowy weather in February for the past two years that have interfered with the growth of our customary pre-spring flowering plants like the crocus and daffodil.
The question now may well be whether we will continue this trend for a third consecutive year.
Will we have an unprecedented third white Christmas in a row? Will we have stunted prevernal flowers again next February? Will April again be the cruelest month of the year in 2019?
The 2017-18 LaNina ocean current is still expected to fade out by summer, but that doesn’t rule out its possible return in the fall.
It’s too early to predict a LaNina hat-trick for now, but I’ll be watching the trends, and will pass on any predictions from reliable sources that come to my attention during the summer when such predictions are normally made.
(Chris Carss is a Chemainus resident and a long-time weather observer/recorder for Environment Canada).