March into June during May

A recent spell of days with temperatures rising to the upper 80’s to low 90’s, plus sunny weather, was broken by a series of thunderstorms, leaving us with days full of wet, windy, cloudy, much cooler weather with temperatures reaching only the upper 50’s to mid-60’s. I took advantage of the cooler, wetter, weather to plant a pair of Serviceberry bushes in the back yard. My inspiration derived from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Serviceberry, as well as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of water. Plus, I planted the “shadbushes" in memory of the shad fishing I used to do long ago during May in Massachusetts and in memory of a long-time friend who walked on several years ago, after he followed a career in public service with a stint at the nursery where I bought the Amelanchier “Standing Ovation” cultivars.

The contrary mixed-up months' weather has hindered spring yard cleanup. Winter storms brought down more dead branches, as usual, and a couple of sickly trees. Before the wood gets gathered up, I want to reduce existing brush piles to ashes. Too much wind or too wet wood has been the case for the past month or so. Maybe next week? I’m trying to react to all of this piling on with a “learn to live with Nature” philosophy, but some days that’s a real struggle.

back yard lilac bush in bloom, last year

Photo by J. Harrington

The lilac bushes in front of the house have finally bloomed, about a week behind those south of us in the Twin Cities urban heat island. The bush in the back yard is just beginning to bloom. Seeing and smelling lilacs in bloom takes me back to grammar school and the yearly period just before summer vacation. The nuns prohibited lilac bouquets in classrooms because, they claimed, it made us students sleepy headed. I could never notice a difference in my friends or myself between lilac time and the rest of the year. Although, when weather approaches normal patterns, May, with or without lilac flowers, is often a sleepy-headed month as we gradually warm up and ease into summer’s “lazy, hazy, crazy days.”

Sprig of Lilac

Hyam Plutzik
1911 – 1962

Their heads grown weary under the weight of Time—
These few hours on the hither side of silence—
The lilac sprigs bend on the bough to perish.

Though each for its own sake is beautiful,
In each is the greater, the remembered beauty.
Each is exemplar of its ancestors.

Within the flower of the present, uneasy in the wind,
Are the forms of those of the years behind the door.
Their faint aroma touches the edge of the mind.

And the living and the past give to one another.
There is no door between them.  They pass freely
Out of themselves; becoming one another.

I see the lilac sprigs bending and withering.
Each year like Adonis they pass through the dumb-show of death,
Waxing and waning on the tree in the brain of a man.

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