May Day! Mayday?

May Day has to be one of the few holidays I've never celebrated.Of course, this is one of my best friends' favorite holidays, so I can't say I've never never celebrated May Day, but it is a holiday that I don't know much about and that generally slips by without my noticing.

Perhaps my neglect of May Day stems from the fact that the holiday is linked with the Celtic holiday of Beltane which means the day's all about celebrating fertility. Around these parts, things don't look too fertile come May 1. It won't be until sometime in June that we'll be able to fill "May baskets" to overflowing with flowers and actually feel like dancing about a May pole in celebration of the world's abundance and beauty.

After the early spring thaw this year, we've been treated to an especially long period of muck and brown before the spring green up. But this past week, I noticed the earliest early season wildflowers starting to poke up their pretty little heads. Wood anemones, violets, bearberry flowers, even the appearance of the common place dandelion is enough to make my heart glow with the promise of springtime.  

Full disclosure: photo taken in 2010

Yesterday, I ran to town to get the first load of soil for the new raised beds and pots. I returned with a Subaru Baja absolutely brimming with compost, humus, manure, top soil, and peat moss. After filling up one raised bed, I came inside to find not one, but two little wood ticks scampering across me.  So the wonderful joys of spring are upon us, as are the little annoyances.

On Saturday, Andy and I thought we might watching an entirely different sort of "Mayday." A rather large personal airplane (a Cessna Caravan to be specific - if you're interested in such things) landed just outside of the bay and headed over to the dock where the neighbors keep their own (albeit, much smaller) float plane during the summer months. It's pretty unusual to see a plane of this size in the area unless a portion of the woods are on fire, but it turned out that the pilot and passengers were just looking for a dock protected from the wind where they could moor the plane during an overnight visit to a friend's cabin. Not exactly a dramatic story, but the plane caused plenty of buzz during its short stay in the bay.

Happy May Day everyone! What are you celebrating today?