My *Favorite* Favorite Month

    The woods behind my house has put on her summer leaves, hiding the auto junkyard for another season.  I enjoy not watching cars rust, but I’ll miss the squirrels on their concourse through the canopy of trees divided by the narrow straits of a dead tree to the east.  Right there a squirrel exits the foliage onto one very skinny twig which swings wildly as a kite tail with his weight.  But he never, ever falls.  He climbs it slowly and carefully to the next fatter limb and then disappears into green again.  I can’t even 

hear him walking, like when the leaves are dry and down.  Sometimes they chatter back and forth, about who knows what?  About the weather . . . or those two idiot dogs who have never caught them even once?

          I have favorite things about every other month, but May remains my favorite favorite.  My whole yard smells like candy, thanks to the irises.  I can’t get sad for tulips ending, when peonies are coming on, with pink Annabelle hydrangeas not that far behind.  Everything is so alive.  In springtime, “everything can come back new and beautiful” isn’t something only poets say, but so does the world outside my kitchen window.  I can live almost a year on the memory of May, then here it comes again.  No winter month has this hold on me.

          Naturally I turn to privilege, how such weather is only such a blessing to people with my same choices.  As soon as this porch gets too sweaty, I’m going back inside.  For the rest of the summer I’ll move from one air-conditioned space to another and eat sun-kissed food delivered to my table by sunbaked people I’ll never know.  I don’t have to walk to work, or even to the bus stop.  I’ll carry a sweater to my meetings just in case they keep theirs turned down too low.​

          As with everything, the task is finding grace, the grace received and the grace that must be shared.  Spring comes to the deadest places eventually, but need not stay just where it lands.  Where much has been given . . . much can be forwarded into other places.  I pray you a beautiful, joyful, faithful-with-all-that-you-have-been-given spring day.