April is violet. February was red, of course, and March was inevitably green. May is coming up with a profusion of roses that are pink enough to make my teeth hurt.
At least that’s the way they appear on the calendar in my office. I didn’t choose this calendar for its pastel floral paintings. Nor did I select it for the inspirational sayings that accompany each month. Both the paintings and the phrases are a bit too pretty for my taste, in a “can’t we all just enjoy the sweet little butterflies and flowers and love one another” sort of way.
The reason this particular calendar is hanging on my wall (off to one side, where it’s out of my direct line of sight) is that each month comes complete with a handy-dandy little pocket to hold deadline-driven pieces of paper such as bills that need to be paid. This organizational feature seemed like a good idea after that little matter last fall of the property taxes that weren’t paid by the deadline. The resulting $18.02 in interest wasn’t all that bad. What really bothered me, since I like to imagine myself as a conscientious and organized person, was the embarrassment.
So I don’t pay a lot of attention to the decorative part of this calendar; I just make sure I keep an eye on the pockets. When I turned the page over at the beginning of April, however, I couldn’t help but notice its bit of inspiration: “Reach for the stars that lie brilliantly within your soul.”
Or at least I assume that’s what was intended. What is actually printed on the page is, “Reach for the stars that lie brilliantly within your sole.”
Wow. I mean, really. That is just so, you know, profound. It makes me feel so, like, grounded.
All those times I’ve stopped to take off my shoe and shake out an annoying bit of something or other, I always thought it was just plain old gravel. Now I find it may have been a star. I’ve never known that the inspiration of the heavens could be so down-to-earth.
The next time I’m feeling less than brilliant, all I need to do is take off my shoe and rummage around inside it in search of stars. If it smells a little funky in there, it can’t be plain old sweaty feet; it must be stardust.
This surely will inspire me to stride forward in a new appreciation of my own inner wisdom. Or at least it will inspire me to a new appreciation of my own inner proofreader. Not to mention a new understanding of the term “twinkletoes.”
Practical Prairie Woman 
We too, use the calendars with the pockets. They were hard to find for a number of years. The Dallas Elevator gave them out and Laurie Sundquist was working there. I asked her for one and she sent two of them, every year to Arizona where we lived at that time. Our tax man provides us with the quarterly forms and envelopes and they go into the month that we file them. So far, we have not been embarassed by not filing them on time. Those tax guys are tough, which we discovered by being audited a few times.