Goddess of May

In late April a few years ago, I was coming home from work and noticed something. With the windows down, driving over the ridge just past the river, I noticed that the coltish, freshly bloomed youth of Spring in April was giving way to something more mature, something richer. Over the past few nights I saw the same thing happening, remembered a journal entry I made those years ago at the end of April, sensed the change in the breeze and in the way lavender clouds floated in front of an orange sherbet sunset just before a Spring storm. It was like traveling in time.

I watched the sky in the distance as the storm front passed my area of the county in favor of the county to the northwest. Fading blue sky laced with molten orange met misty anvils and the blue-gray cotton candy of a twilight storm. Flashes of light danced behind the gauzy curtain, outlining the thunderheads in bright and pale pinks, lilacs, electric peaches, and blue fire. All behind the ridge – the spinal cord of hills and trees separating our neck of the woods from theirs (the other county). Magnificence.

Just before I turned into our small community of neighborhoods, I was driving straight toward the storm. Had I kept going I might have found myself struggling to share the stage with it, said stage being made of pitted asphalt and painted with the faded yellow of warning. But just after that right turn home, I breathed deeply and caught the essence through my open windows of something I haven’t smelled since the first few months I lived here, the smell of the country – this particular countryside – before it rains. I love that scent.

It’s the hint of refreshing rain mixed with the heavy-sweet flavor of balmy air – air full of the gossip of buzzing insects working in the bulb flowers and of the mingled breaths of newly blossomed, developing trees, musky with youth and dewy with the syrup of honeysuckle, air full of electricity and life, seduction set free to fly without restraint through the atmosphere.

That moment is when spring is real, when life matters. That’s all it takes, just that smell. It is how my ancestors predicted heavy rains before Doppler and before TV.

It is the beginning of a new relationship, a time when we usher out the fresh, shy bloom of April, say goodbye to the chaste whispers that draw the wild things back out into the open and welcome with open arms the more mature, more unabashedly sensuous May.

April is gangly, a bit clumsy as she grows into herself. She is blooming, warm but moody – going from cold to hot to cold again – like a teenager coping with hormones. She is beautiful, but not quite filled out in certain places. But May…

May teases for a while, with a glimpse of bare leg through the back-lit curtain, only to burst through, fully, mere moments later. May is April after she has learned to appreciate her conquests, after she learns to ply her trade of seduction, reveling in every stage from the introduction to the afterglow. Still youthful, still fresh and still sweet – but something more. May is fuller, richer, warmer, calling gently with the first light of morning, softly singeing during the day – just hot enough to burn but then soothing your skin with her sighs – and languorously drawing you in at dusk with her mystery and the promise to reveal it.

May is pleasure incarnate.