Beltane                                                                          Early Growth Moon

In a long ago time I took a group of youngsters from Brooklyn Center United Methodist Church on an outing.  Wherever it was we ended up, there was a beanbag toss game that featured Howdydoody characters.  The kids, as kids always do, said, “What’s that?”  And I, as unsuspecting aging adults always do, said, “Why, that’s Howdydoody.”  The blank stares gave me my first frisson of growing old though I was only 27 at the time.

On this now very outdated program there was a character whose name describes for me the season we’ve been passing through since, oh, March or so:  Winterspringsummerfall.

This is not a new phenomenon, though, as James Russell Lowell’s poem shows:

Under the Willows [May is a pious fraud of the almanac]

by James Russell Lowell

May is a pious fraud of the almanac,
A ghastly parody of real Spring
Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind;
Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date,
And, with her handful of anemones,
Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,
The season need but turn his hourglass round,
And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear,
Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms,
Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front
With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard
All overblown. Then, warmly walled with books,
While my wood-fire supplies the sun's defect,
Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams,
I take my May down from the happy shelf
Where perch the world's rare song-birds in a row,
Waiting my choice to open with full breast,
And beg an alms of springtime, ne'er denied
Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods
Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22956?utm_source=PAD%3A+Spring+Song+by+Sherwood+Anderson&utm_campaign=poemaday_051813&utm_medium=email#sthash.6TuB0x7D.dpuf