-May-
Vivid, living green...an explosion of wildflowers...time in miniature...colors...numbers...sights...sounds...living growth.
May is more than a time of the year; it is a spiritual experience.
Each Appalachian Mountain Country Day’s sunrise illuminates the on-going picture story. Each has its own specialness. Living growth is always ever onward.
The greenness across the forest floor is intense.
Sunbeams
reflect off drops of moisture on fern fronds, sometimes scattering multi-mini rainbows.
Fields are spangled with the season’s first crop of dancing dandelions.
Our hearing is filled with full-water streams. Their bounding enthusiasm is eager to nourish this year’s pulsating new life.
There is no holding back just as there is no going back.
Shadow play returns. Now we know from where fairies and elves and dwarfs and leprechauns come.
The greatest number of flowers are in full bloom.
Babes are born.
A feeling of delight comes into our hearts as we nose-touch the petal of the trailing arbutus and smell its sweetness, fondle the leaf pattern of the trout lily and marvel at Nature’s creativity, and watch the newly hatched pollywogs playing at the creek’s edge. It’s as if we never had the experience, never knew the child-like happiness.
The feelings are overwhelming as we fuse once again with Earth’s fragility and a sameness that is basic to us all; plant, animal, mineral.
Copyright © 1988, 1999 Barbara A. Smith and John G. Hipps. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published May 4, 1988 in the Free-Press Courier , Westfield, Pennsylvania.