Happy May Day

The 1st of May


a tisket a tasket
the trollwife delivered
a huge may basket


A rainy May Day, but the Trollwife was able to arrange and deliver an enormous May Basket, in the traditon of the day to the Nightshade Berry Fairy who lives in a pine tree at the back of our garden.

Delivering May Baskets brings up one of my earliest memories of doing such with my mother. It was before I was in school, so the early 50s when these old traditions may have been done more often. I remember that earlier in the week we drove to the closet 'big' town. A town that had a busy main street called locally, "Rockland Hill" with lots of shops. One was a Peterson's Drugs  with a fabulous soda fountain and counter seats. My mother bought or was given an empty white cardboard quart ice cream container. We came home and decorated it with colored crepe paper, attached ruffles of the same material, bent and attached several of my dad's pipe cleaners twisted together for a handle. We picked similar blooms as the Troll wife and arranged them in a glass jam tumbler inside the decorated 'basket'. My mother loved real baskets and had a lovely collection of very early ones that she couldn't part with, so we made this May basket from scratch. 

Basket in hand we crossed the street to a house where two elderly sisters had lived since my mother was a child growing up in the same neighborhood. One never married, Miss Griggs, and the other, Mrs. Ryan was widowed young. I knocked on the door and they opened it and gushed over the basket. I don't remember much about the actual encounter, but my mother had one fascinating story about them from her childhood. They 'taught her to swim' by having her lie on their carpet and mime swimming strokes, imagine. I never saw my mother, who spent her summers by the  rocky down east icy waters of Maine do anything but wade in the water. So, I don't think the instructions were very successful. 

In the Extra you will see me returning from my first day ever of school in 1955 with my basket lunchbox. All my classmates had paper bags or proper metal lunchboxes with printed tartan plaid that I coveted, but I had little basket that I would give my eye teeth for now. Memories...

For the Record, 
This day came in with heavy rain settling into gloom.

All hands wary.