May is such a good month. I don’t know if others do this, but I tend to underrate it because it’s not spectacular. Here, at least, it is the greening-out month, and the planting month, and the month we’re supposed to get rain but sometimes we get snow and sometimes we get a heat wave. The bugs wake up but they’re not ridiculous. The tulips bloom, and then the lilacs really get going at the end of the month. It’s a great month for tea on the deck, even if one needs a sweater.
This is the road I take for my walks. It’s at its best in May, that’s for sure. We got very little rain; it’s green nonetheless, but it’s also been smoky from the forest fires in the north. I can’t say I’m enjoying the climate apocalypse, and I sure don’t think it’s going to get better. I’ve found it difficult to stay hopeful about it, actually; I hate the horrible contrast between that picture, where it’s green and beautiful and bug-free, and the knowledge that there should be bugs, it should have rained more, there shouldn’t be hundreds of fires this early. I don’t know what to do about it. I suppose one thing I am doing is throwing a crap ton of money into my carbon footprint, because our air conditioner died just a few months after our furnace did, so we are upgrading the whole situation and moving away from natural gas to electric and getting a heat pump. My personal impact is of course minimal, and shit like the illegal occupation and bombing of Gaza and the outrageous water and energy consumption of large language models like ChatGPT is doing a catastrophic level of damage, but it’s important to do something in order to feel less powerless, so I am doing it. I’ll try to enjoy what we still have, so that if (when) it’s gone, I can carry the memory of lush green summers and winters so cold the snow squeaks.
That was a downer. Here are some nice things from May. Sam had to go to Zimbabwe for a week over Mother’s Day, but he had flowers delivered and they were stunning.
Last year I bought tickets to see Riverdance on their 30th anniversary tour and the date finally came around and it was AWESOME. I rented the VHS of Riverdance multiple times as a kid and forced my family to pay for tickets to see it on Broadway when we went to New York in 2001, and I was excited and nervous to take the kids to it. Would they be bored? Did I waste a large amount of money? Nope! They loved it!
May was also the month of year-end recitals and concerts, planting my little planties, reading the entirety of the Saint of Steel books that have been published so far by T Kingfisher, and planning a new writing project. So pretty solid, all in all.
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