Today’s the first of May and as my husband and I took our morning walk, we reminisced about making May baskets when we were children. Usually these were made of woven strips of paper or paper cones with string handles. We’d fill them with flowers and sometimes little candies and then take them to the front porches of our friends and neighbors and, after knocking on the door or ringing the door bell, run away as fast as we could so they so they wouldn’t see who’d left it.
Our daughter Keri remembers making May baskets with my mother and filling them with violets, but sadly this tradition gradually faded away so that none of our grandchildren remember them. Of course we could have kept on making May baskets ourselves, but part of the fun was also having other people participate – a kind of community experience.
This morning after our walk I looked up some information on how this tradition started and found a particularly detailed source that had all kinds of interesting facts, not only about May baskets and festivities like Maypole dancing, but that these yearly rituals had their roots in astronomy. Since May 1 was the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, people wanted another excuse to celebrate. You can find all of that and more in a site called simply “Almanac.”
This week in New Hampshire our weather is still a bit rainy as a holdover from April, but next week the weather will be warming into the 60s during the day and 40s at night. When I see weather like that coming, I start thinking about heading into town to the farmer’s market or local greenhouses for some six packs of flowers and vegetables – buying Spring plants is one of my favorite May pastimes.
First, however, we have to rake all the leaves off the garden beds, which we’ve been doing in the last few days. And it’s exciting to see little shoots of green, like the Hostas, poking up underneath their winter leaf covers.
May is such a glorious time, because all around us there’s a delicate greening of the landscape, which always gives a rise to the spirits after our long New Hampshire winters.
The only thing I’m NOT looking forward to in May is the arrival of our Spring nemesis: the Black Flies, which come to harass us right when we’re out planting, forcing us (well, at least me) to wear hats with protective netting, long sleeves, and gloves.
But let’s not worry about them quite yet – we still have about a week until they arrive!