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Premier Robert Stanfield told me 39 years ago he hated April, and I couldn't figure out why. I was still a Toronto boy and, up there, April always smelled of warmth, new leaves, and the coming summer.

But having lived in the Maritimes for 30-odd winters, I understand his distaste for a month that promises so much, and delivers so little. You've served four months in the slammer we call winter. Spring has officially sprung, and April should deliver fragrant and sunny days. You deserve them. So what does it do? It stays as cold as Siberia, and whacks you with blizzards.

At least Stanfield did not solemnly tell me, "April is the cruellest month." When T. S. Eliot used those words to open his dismal, beautiful masterpiece, The Wasteland, little did he know that the unimaginative would one day apply them to everything from a hockey team's slump to a plunge in stock-market prices. The Internet boasts hundreds of reasons why April is the cruellest month.

Though Eliot was an American-born Londoner, his assessment of April pops up around the world. Thus, a Web site of The Hindu, India's national newspaper, says, "April is the cruellest month-an adage that would apply well to our mutual-fund friends, what with the market collapsing." For Palestinians, April is the cruellest month because, according to writer Israel Shamir, it was in April of 1948 that they "were doomed to start a journey to five decades of exile." For politics in Pakistan, writer Muhammad Yasin claims, April is the cruellest month simply because "the month beyond March has always been full of disastrous happenings."

For the historically minded, April is when The Titanic sank (1912); two teenagers gunned down a dozen others at the Columbine High School, Littleton, Colo. (1999); an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine spread radioactive fallout (1986); President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died (1945); Hitler was born (1889) and killed himself (1945); Mussolini was executed (1945); and an assassin nailed Abraham Lincoln (1865) and Martin Luther King (1968). Lincoln died on Good Friday, which marks the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Although no one will ever know the exact date, biblical scholars believe Christ's crucifixion really did occur in April.

For Soccer Analyst, which provides information about "the fast-growing world of investing in soccer clubs," April is the cruellest month because, "As the season approaches the moment of truth, managers and finance directors are starting to consider the future."

For movie-goers in 2000, one Web site predicted, April would be the cruellest month because the release of "American Psycho" and "Scream 3" would "satisfy those sick puppies among you who like watching people being hacked to bits." For online journalists, last April was the cruellest month, because publishers were wiping out their jobs. For Judy Martin, who writes an online newsletter for quilters, April is the cruellest month because "my seasonal allergies kick in, and I can hardly sleep for coughing, wheezing and sneezing."

Pundits never tire of saying April is the cruellest month because that's when Canadian and Americans face deadlines for paying federal taxes. April can be the cruellest month for heaven only knows how many reasons. Suicide rates soar. High-school seniors fret over what university they should try to get into. University seniors struggle to finish their theses on time. One fellow even complained on a Web site that April was cruel to him because that's when he bought gingko at a health-food store to make himself smarter. "I certainly don't feel any smarter," he groused. "The sad thing is, I should have known better." Oh, that ruthless, heartless, bestial April!

But for me, as for Stanfield, April's cruelty lies entirely in the weather it imposes on our corner of the world. No one has described it better than the immortal New England poet, Robert Frost:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

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