April Is Here!

Flowers Around Me

Spring thoughts shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.
All spring photos were taken this week, © 2025 mae sander.

Baby Owls

Can you see two owlets peeking out from their hollow tree? We visited them on Monday.
Shared with Eileen’s critters.

 An Excellent Novel

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think many people are recalling the start of the pandemic five years ago, and probably share my feeling that it seems very long ago and at the same time seems like just yesterday. The pandemic is at the center of the lives of the characters in this newly published novel, which makes it perfect reading for right now! Ultimately, the narrator says: “The ending of lockdown trailed off like a forgotten song. If only life could immediately return to what it used to be. Some bars and restaurants had opened, all hesitantly, the rules changing day by day.” Things return to normal — but not really.

Dream Count is about four characters, all women from Africa who immigrate or simply visit the United States. Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou, and Omelogor all know one another in various ways. Each belongs to different ethnic and status groups. They have different economic opportunities: one comes from a quite rich family, one makes money on her own, and one is quite poor. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayals of the women, their relationships with men, their views of both American and African social norms, their attitudes towards having children, their jobs or careers, and many other features of their lives. The author has a fabulous way of creating stories and showing the inner and the outer realities of the characters.

The poorest woman in the story, Kadiatou, works as a hotel maid in New York, and her high-profile experience is based on the much-publicized rape of a hotel maid by the famous French banker Daniel Strauss-Kahn, in 2011. However, the author created an entirely different background for the character and her reaction to the events and the cancellation of the prosecution of the perpetrator, imagining an original persona into existence

What is the “Dream Count” of the title? It’s the way that Chiamaka, the pivotal character, during lockdown, reviews her many failed relationships with a series of lovers, both serious and casual. At the end, her friend remarks that “normal people spent lockdown suffering anxiety while you were busy looking up your exes and reviewing your body count.” Chiamaka (who is narrating the novel, corrects her:

“My dream count,” I said. 

“So how many dreams have you been with?” 

“The world has changed and you look back to take stock of how you’ve lived. And you have so much regret,” I said. I wished I had not used that word, “regret.”

In my opinion, Dream Count is one of the best novels I’ve read recently because of the penetrating portraits of the characters and the fascinating insights into both African and American lives.

A Poem For Changing Seasons

With all the big wind storms that have swept across the country lately, I thought a symbolic wind poem would be good for this week —

[what if a much of a which of a wind]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives truth to the summer's lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two, 

peels forever out of his grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn't: blow death to was)

—all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die, the more we live

(Source: Poetry Foundation)

Caused by the wind in April, 2025.