May Delights

We’ll pause and take a week’s break from DBT Skills Training to celebrate the joys of this most beautiful month, shall we?

It’s Saturday afternoon on a gorgeous spring day, all the more delightful because downpours and thunderstorms were predicted and instead, a light morning mist has changed into sun and blue skies. Even the high pollen count has lessened and I could do my power walk easily (well, it’s what I call a vigorous fast pace with arms swinging which is the Octogenarian version.)

This morning I read of a morning tag/estate sale (usually the estate bit translates to high prices for very mediocre wares) and the words Smith and Hawkin clinched the expedition so off Waze and I went. It was underwhelming to say the least (3 very over-priced pieces of garden thngs from my favorite long-out-of business fancy-schmansy retailer …Mill Valley,CA of course, 1982 until 2009… which my late friend A. visited, she looking and I buying. Nostalgia, those feelings of yearning and a slight sadness for things that have passed and likely will never be again, yes, that was what I knew would happen and of course, it was so.

But the garden is looking especially good after a week of rain which relieved nearly a year of drought and that’s what I’m most mindful of right now. And I never ever get tired of the solid wall of green beyond the deck. A few short months ago, I could easily look between the trees and see a great distance through the woods. Now it’s spectacular.

The bees are nosing into the hanging baskets and flowering plants and we humans are deliriously welcoming the first of local produce: asparagus, rhubarb (never too bitter in my book but marrying so well with strawberries into compotes and pie), artichokes, beets, rainbow Swiss chard, radishes, ramps, and very early peas. My local Food Co-op had an outdoor co-op 42 vendor meet and greet with mobs of people sampling all kinds of foods and alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. It was almost as though none of us had eaten all winter and now were wandering around grinning, many with food on fingers, shirts, and chins. It’s the simple pleasures, right?

It’s never too late for a new and wonderful experience and I received mine on Mother’s Day. As you know, I’m contentedly child-free, at times child-free with relief yet I would tell my late dear sister-friend A. for years on end that if ever I had a daughter, I would want one like her eldest, M. M. who is 49 years old, an MD, and mother of 3 herself, has given me the greatest complement of saying she considers me her second mother and sent my first Mother’s Day gift. Of course the sentiment is the most important but truly, I was stunned by this 14 pound book “Audubon’s Birds of America”. So I have been feasting on the life-size water colors of the birds interspersed with watching the birds outside.

One could say it’s a good contrast to my bedtime reading of Lilja Sigurdardottir Icelandic crime novels. And speaking of reading, I may have mentioned that I was brought up (or dropped off) to be a Catholic but it has been decades since I considered myself one. And yet, the election of Robert Francis Prevost to become Pope and Leo XIV has occupied a surprising amount of real estate in my brain. I ordered “Confessions” to listen to on Audible. And this morning, I drove by a large Catholic Church in town…deliberately, as I never knew if and where it was, so who knows….Life is strange.

I’ll leave you with a Mary Oliver poem: “May”

“May, and among the miles of leafing,
blossoms storm out of the darkness—
windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees
dive into them and I too, to gather
their spiritual honey. Mute and meek, yet theirs
is the deepest certainty that this existence too—
this sense of well-being, the flourishing
of the physical body—rides
near the hub of the miracle that everything
is a part of, is as good
as a poem or a prayer, can also make
luminous any dark place on earth.”

~Mary Oliver

(I found this in

Ned Hayes

Ned Notes…the first and only place I’ve seen it.)