Thursday, May 8, 2014

Mais oui!


Here it is May. Already the eighth day, a fast week since Mayday, which somehow became ship-to-shore code for "Help!" One might have legitimately radioed it that way this past winter—"Mayday!" as in,"Get me the hell to Mayday!" or "There's no place like May...There's no place like May!" But I'm pretty sure Mayday is a respelling of its French homophone, "M'aidez!" or "Help me!"

May we? ask the yielding landscape, the spring migrants, the testing flora. And the reply, hesitant in April, is finally a welcoming "Mais oui!" Dare to change your wardrobe; pump up your bike tires; guillotine your storm windows, dare to go sashaying along Spy Pond in shorts and T-shirt, and acknowledge those airborne stirrings of puppy love, poodle kanoodles, boxers-in-briefs.

Mais oui! But of course! And in the Truth of the bird, this run of days is when it's time to fly a long distance, from here to the other here, also known as northern America, which is very exciting to us terrestrials, who have a kind of album of living experience with spaces for each FOY (first o' year) kind: Baltimore oriole flashing orange on a treetop,  wood thrush singing the Song of the Forest that Pan taught its oldest ancestor, dipped-in-blue indigo bunting, and twenty-odd kinds of warblers teasing us with colors and peewee cadenzas from the trees, especially the Blackburnian, Canada, Prothonotary, Hooded, and Chestnut-sided I will once again fail to see. But then again, I may. And if I don't, I won't dis May. Much. And dat's all I got to say.