spynotes ::
  May 01, 2007
Whence this perfume floating everywhere

This morning Mr. Spy mentioned that it was May Day. At first I was reminded of my repeated attempts to visit a certain sculpture on my campus which supposedly casts a shadow of a hammer a sickle on the ground not far from where the student socialists are inevitably hawking their newspapers. But then I recalled the less political May Days of my childhood.

We lived on a cul-de-sac then that was a mix of young families and older people. Our next door neighbors on one side were the kind of older people who kept their doors locked and occasionally peered out the door at you and would sit in their houses with the lights off on Halloween no matter how long you rang the bell. The neighbors on the other side were the Nelsens. They were Norwegian, two elderly sisters and their older brother, the kind you see more often in the upper Midwest than in our small town in Connecticut. My father traveled a lot when we lived there. Whenever he was out of town, Mr. Nelsen, who to me seemed as if he must be at least eighty, would shovel our walks. The year my dad was travelling and an ice storm hit knocking out power for a week, the Misses Nelsen made us muffins and Mr. Nelsen brought them over, along with a load of firewood he had chopped. Whenever they saw us outside, they would bring us candy they kept in a dish in their living room.

On May Day, we got up early and made baskets out of paper. We ran down to the patch of land encircled by the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, the place where we played makeshift baseball and climbed trees extra high because we were out of our mother's view. And we picked all the flowers we could find. There were mostly violets and dandelions, but we thought they were beautiful. We filled the baskets with our harvest, and carried them one by one to each of our neighbors' houses and left them on the front porch. And then we went home for breakfast.

Later in the day, we would take a non-chalant walk around the neighborhood, carefully looking like we weren't up to anything in particular, and checked to see what had happened to our baskets. They were all gone, even the one on the reclusive neighbors' porch. But on the Nelsen's porch there was something else in its place. We inched closer to investigate and saw two plastic cups and a note with our names on it. We stepped quietly up onto the porch. The note said, "Thank you for the beautiful flowers. Happy May Day to you too." And the cups were filled with candy.

Mr. Spy decided that he and AJ should make a May Day basket for The Girl Next Door and her family. The went out into the garden and picked wood poppies and bluebells and lilacs and filled a cone they'd made out of construction paper with them. AJ made a card that said "Happy May Day!" and carried them to their front porch, rang the bell, and ran away. A few minutes later, we heard The Girl Next Door yelling out of her window, "Happy May Day, AJ!" And then she appeared at our house, carefully carrying a glass Coke bottle with two wood poppies floating at the top.

It too bad every day doesn't begin with the six-year-olds trading flowers. It's a nice beginning.

3 people said it like they meant it

 
:: last :: next :: random :: newest :: archives ::
:: :: profile :: notes :: g-book :: email ::
::rings/links :: 100 things :: design :: host ::

(c) 2003-2007 harri3tspy

<< chicago blogs >>