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What’s not to like about May? There’s Christy (Moore) and his “As I roved out on a bright May morning/To view the meadows and flowers gay./Whom should I spy but my own true lover/As she sat under yon willow tree.”
Or Simon and Garfunkel’s For Emily Whenever I May Find Her – “April, come she will/When streams are ripe and swelled with rain/May, she will stay/Resting in my arms again.”
And Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life/ That’s what all the people say/You’re riding high in April, shot down in May/But I know I’m gonna change that tune/When I’m back on top, back on top in June”.
Probably my two favourite months are May and June, especially in April when I can anticipate both without any sense of their passing. Nor am I a subscriber to that depressive view of Patrick Pearse for whom the beauty of the world meant sadness, “. . .this beauty that will pass”. But it will come back again.
It’s the light, the earlier mornings and longer evenings, the bursting out of colour all over. It is hope on earth. Especially in a pandemic. It was the month when my first teacher Mrs Molly Forde would place a bunch of freshly cut, yellow primroses every morning before a statue of the Virgin Mary in our classroom.
And a highlight at a later school was this 15th day of May, Feast of St John Baptist de La Salle, founder in late 17th-century France of the earliest schools for poor children. It was the late 19th century before the De La Salle Brothers came to my home place of Ballaghaderreen.
May 15th was a day off every year when we dressed in white shirts, special red and gold ties and short trousers and marched through the town behind our Brothers (fife and drum) Band in their cool blue jackets and gold kilts to Mass in the cathedral. Band members had status and privileges denied us hoi polloi.
Then it was back to school where we feasted on fizzy minerals and sweet cake.
Maybe it was such May 15th memories that made me feel an unexpected pleasure many years later when I recognised the statue of St John Baptiste de La Salle in St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.
May from Latin Majus, possibly from Maja, Maia, a Roman earth goddess (wife of Vulcan).
inaword@irishtimes.com