In Praise of May

Green spreads around me in rippling waves. The trees are fully leafed, singing emerald songs to the sky-blue sky. The morning air has warmed under the bountiful hand of the sun until by late afternoon it shimmers. I tie the sleeves of my sweater around my waist and set off across the fields. Violets are suddenly thick underfoot and I kneel to drink in their sweet scent. The fragrance reminds me of home and my mother’s garden where every spring the violets and lily of the valley bloomed among the burgeoning stems and stalks of day lily, peony, and phlox. 

I strip off my shoes, and socks and wiggle my bare toes in the meadow grass. There is no one to see me and so I throw my arms wide and twirl until I am dizzy—earth and sky and earth and sky and earth and sky—before I must stop or fall.

I stretch out in the soft, still-new grass and think that green smells like fresh air and sunshine and newly growing things. I look up into the sky and let my eyes look beyond the blue, beyond the known, into the vast emptiness that is not really empty but inhabited by the unknown, and I fall in love with it all—the sky, the earth, the fields, the woods, the flowers—just the way I did when I first discovered the world as a small child.