Wild Things: Dear, merry May has my heart

By ED KANZE

June? All in all, with its birds and flowers and echoes of summers of adventure just beginning, June will always be my second favorite of months. But May, dear merry May, ran off with my heart long ago. To this luminous, fecund, warming, cheering fraction of the year my love will always remain steadfast. 

Without doubt, May is the most transformative of months. Or at least it’s the most transformative when it comes to the flourishing of flora and fauna. May begins in our neck of the woods with the leaves of deciduous trees just beginning to unfold. Weeks race by. Then, by month’s end, a bird flying overhead could hardly see exposed ground over most of the wild and semi-wild parts of the landscape, so complete would be the covering of the solar energy collection devices we call leaves.

May brings a surge of a great many of the things I hold dear: the leaves we’ve considered already; delicate wildflowers of rock outcrops and the forest floor, among them wild columbines, jack-in-the-pulpits, and pink lady’s slipper orchids; fern fronds that unfurl like New Year’s Eve party favors; new songbirds arriving morning after morning from as far away as Costa Rica, Venezuela, Brazil and Patagonia; and amphibians that rise out their winter homes in muck and leaf litter and make May nights throb and blaze with their torch songs. 

To appreciate May fully, it’s instructive to the fifth month and add six months to the calendar. Contemplate the differences. By November nearly all the leaves of our maples, birches, oaks, and the rest of the deciduous guild have colored, faded, withered, and fallen. Trunks, limbs and twigs stand bare, gaunt and barren. Those flying bits of art-deco we call butterflies are gone, or nearly so, and those of us who love big, hairy, marvelously patterned orb-weaving spiders can hardly find one to admire. Temperatures plunge. Cell fluids freeze, and animals and plants not fortified to endure winters die. Whereas May is a season of birth and renewal, November brings decline, death, and more death. It’s a month of sad endings.

Which is not to say, mind you, that all things in May are rosy. April may be “the cruellest month,” as T.S. Eliot proclaimed in the opening “The Waste Land,” but May brings its share of casualties. Baby mammals are born, cute as proverbial buttons, insect eggs hatch, caterpillars wriggle, and all manner of other new lives are launched, yet what eventuates from this joyous burst of beginnings? A surge of new life, yes, but that’s not all. Young owls and hawks feast on newborns, as do bobcats, coyotes, foxes, weasels, and all the rest of the carnivorous hungry. Herbivores slaughter new leaves and the embryonic young of plants. A great many newly minted lives flourish, but perhaps an even greater number are, to use a vivid and apt expression,” nipped in the bud.”

Death, of course, is the flip side of the coin of life. May includes its fair share. Still, this is a season when life seems to gain, and for a time hold, the upper hand. Everywhere we look we see greenery rising out of the ground that days or weeks earlier appeared lifeless, and stems festoon themselves with origami leaves and flowers. By day, the very air we breathe vibrates with bird song. 

With each new number I rack up on my personal odometer, I feel a heightened awareness that I will not have the privilege of savoring these marvels of May forever. I unfold my mind and senses, or try to, and work hard to pay attention.