In Love With May

A view of my gardens.

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the dove is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

The Song of Solomon is ancient poetry, but when I read those lines, I see that spring and love and the love of spring has always been the same. Here, three thousand years later, the flowers have appeared on the earth again, the singing of the birds is come, and every morning I am awakened by the voice of the doves cooing in the tree outside my window. I’m a little sad that fig trees won’t grow here. And it will still be a few weeks before my grape vines bud out. I love spring.

Hyacinths.

The first of my tulips.

It’s May and the month seems determined to make up for all of April’s disappointments. Every day in May so far has been beautiful. We haven’t dropped below freezing even once. The days have been warm, most of them sunny, and even the rainy ones were beautiful. We had our first thunderstorm of the season. May the rest of the month be just as lovely – please!

I worked in the garden a lot during the week and loved every minute of it. I tilled the parts of the vegetable garden that needed tilling. I laid down mulch. I made a new raised bed and planted strawberries in it. I planted lettuce seeds. I tore out the old rotten picket fence along the side flowerbed and prepared the bed for planting. I’m trying to decide whether I want to put in a new picket fence or not – I kind of like it without one. We’ll see. In the long flowerbed I planted poppy, hollyhock, nigella, and cornflower seeds.

Garden one after a hard days work.

The new strawberry bed.

New mulch on the pumpkin patch.

The picket fence garden without the picket fence.

All around the yard things are growing fast now. The lilacs have leafed out and their tiny flower buds are visible. The June berry trees have burst into bloom and maples are in bud. Out in the orchard the fruit trees are stirring from their winter’s sleep at last. There are dandelions and violets blooming in the lawn. Spring is an exciting time. It is amazing how quickly it moves once it starts. Every day something new sprouts or blooms. It is thrilling.

Lilac buds.

We’ve decided to undertake a drastic action in our yard. Our spruce trees have been sick for several years now. Nearly all the spruce trees in this area have been affected. Most of ours are dead or dying and they look terrible. We’ve decided to have them removed. There are 26 of them. Some of them are huge. Stacey thinks she knows someone who will cut them down and take the wood as payment. It will be a great destruction and I’m sad for it to happen, but the trees must go now or later, so it looks like they will go now. The woodland garden will no longer be wooded. I plan to replant it with hardwood trees, but it will be decades before it looks like a woodland again.

On Saturday evening we went to an art show at Alfred University. It was the art students’ BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) Theses. One of our friends from church was a participant. I’m not a fan of modern art and I was not impressed. As we wandered through the displays we were sometimes amused, often perplexed, and usually disgusted. There was nothing refined, noble, inspiring, or beautiful. The best things we saw were some ceramic bowls that were at least pretty, but not high art. We saw walls decorated with deformed uteruses (uteri?) made of black glass. We saw a set of swings made of glass with glowing feathers under them. We saw bizarre paintings depicting odd and disturbing and poorly executed images of twisted and deformed human nudes and ugly, surreal scenes. Some of what we saw looked like art projects done by untalented children. And this is art? I have been a pursuer of beauty all my life and have studied art throughout history. I know beauty and worth when I see it and I do not see it in most of what we sadly call art these days. Somewhere art took a wrong turn. This video explains it better than I can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNI07egoefc

 

Deformed black glass uteruses (uteri?).

Swings and feathers.

I don't even know.

Really?

Real art - La Primavera (Spring) by Botticelli.

It’s a little cooler today and it started to rain on our way home from church. The drive to and from Wellsville was lovely. The June berry trees are flowering all along the edge of the forest and in people’s yards there are daffodils and magnolia bushes in bloom. A sister in our branch brought beautiful bouquets of daffodils to church. When I saw them all I could think was “I need to plant more daffodils this fall.” I want hundreds of daffodils to bloom around me next spring. So we are home now. Today is Fast Sunday and we are hungry. Lunch will be ready shortly. Then I will go down and do the chores and after that enjoy a quiet Sabbath afternoon and evening, refreshing myself for whatever awaits in the week ahead.