April is coming soon. A beautiful word. Something like a flute. Or like raindrops: Ap, ril)) — almost a circus, a trill — arriving birds?
In infancy and thereabouts, the word “April” was associated for me with dripping thaw, melting snow, the last days of icicles, and so on and so forth.
Why a girl living in our southern parts imagined April in icicles, I cannot say; probably the determining thing was not the meaning after all, but the sounds: r, l — beautiful.
“Beautiful” for me was never associated with lush bows, lush dresses, lush flounces and ruffles. I looked at girls in pink ruffles and curls with bewilderment. Perhaps that is why balls do not arouse other feelings in me. A ball as a game, a ball as a spectacle — yes; but a ball as a ball?
One must love oneself very tenderly to take balls completely seriously.
That is why I do not go to them, even when it seems to me that I deserve them.
I remember my graduation evening. Girls did not go to hairdressers then. “Our people don’t take taxis to bakeries!”
My sandals — wonderful ones, made of light white-gray leather — my mother had brought in advance from the GDR; but there was no dress until the very last day. There were no dresses in the shop even remotely resembling graduation dresses; as for fabrics, the counters mostly held faded calicoes and flannels, the kind called baika. The situation was almost hopeless.
The bazaar saved us. The market. True, it was more often called the “tolchok” then.
Different things lay spread out on newspapers right on the asphalt: shoes, dishes, fabrics; almost no books.
We found the white length of fabric with silver sparkles in the last rows, when there was almost no hope left. I cannot say I liked the fabric, but graduation was in a week, and there was no other chance.
The dress turned out festive and rather sweet. I do not remember at all what happened to it later. But it disappeared immediately; it did not take root.
The day after graduation I flew to Lviv to take entrance exams for the institute. Exams, admission, a beautiful city, new friends, impressions, studies.
I remembered the dress only now. I do not feel sorry for it at all, though it was shiny and beautiful. A proper girlish dress.
And the word “ball” did not take root in the surroundings of my life either: to my mind it is somehow deliberate, pompous, and silly. Quite another thing is “ball” as in a score. Just one letter in Russian, and how the sound changes))
That extra “l” makes the result kin to “April,” despite the softness in the second case.
So I do love beauty. And if not in ruffles, then in sounds — certainly! And I love it in trees, squares and parks, rivers and the sea, in colors and people.
But what we now call parks requires an entirely new definition.
Good morning, my beautiful ones — April is coming soon!
