Reading Our Region

Essays from a Regional Writer

Susan Charkes enjoys hearing and telling stories, especially those involving the environment, farming, and sustainability in our region. Discover her poetic view of the outdoors and be inspired to visit the places she describes. Learn more about Susan, her writing, and even hear her podcasts at www.susancharkes.com.

Sample these selected writings:

Featured Items:

Time to go a May-ing again

by Susan Charkes

May. The air is thick with sudden light, as flowers burst into being – painting white, yellow, blue, pink onto the blank canvas of sky and ground. Wind scatters petals like memories of snow; trees drip with fragrance. May comes: We must go.

Who will go a-Maying with me? A-what?

In 1912, when Edna St Vincent Millay first read this poem, her audience knew what Maying was:

Come we’ll go to a place I know
Where every year pink mayflowers grow.
And home at night come journeying
With our arms and hearts Brim full of spring.

Maying used to be an American rite of spring. Around May 1, people would journey to woods and meadows to gather spring wildflowers, carrying home armfuls of blossoms. They might wear flowers in their hair, or decorate their houses with flowering branches. Maying ritualized the experience of spring and ensured that, even while wilderness retreated from advancing civilization, Americans would still venture from village, town and city; make contact with nature; and bring some back.

Thoreau, in his March 2, 1859 journal, wrote, “We talk about spring as at hand before the end of February, and yet it will be two good months, one sixth part of the whole year, before we can go a-maying.”

John Muir, enduring an April 30 snowstorm on Mount Shasta in 1877, sought to lift his companion’s spirits: “But never mind…; the night will wear away at last, and tomorrow we go a-Maying, and what camp fires we will make, and what sun baths we will take!”

Charles J. Peterson in 1843 urged, “Oh! Let us go a maying. We will away from the dull, brick-town; we will away into the country, the fresh, green, breezy country…. All through the long winter months we have been waiting for this day.”

The month of May is named for Maia, a Roman springtime goddess. The first record of “Maying” was in Malory’s 1485 Morte d’Arthur. Queen Guenever, accompanied by her knights and their ladies, all dressed in green, “rode on Maying in woods and meadows as it pleased them, in great joy and delight,” ending up “bedashed with herbs, mosses and flowers, in the best manner and freshest.”

The essence of Maying was always that physical bonding with nature, a shedding of adult inhibitions in celebration of the youth, innocence and beauty of spring and of love, abandon and loss of innocence. Maying, like childhood, partook of both wildness and innocence. In 1901 Dr. Charles C. Abbott wrote of the appropriate frame of mind for Maying: “There must be wildness in the air and we must feel it … In what consists this wildness? It may be asked. In everything. May is not a savage but she is wild. She is a child of Nature, and only such are free from all we would forget when we go a- Maying.” The “Mayer” approaching the woods “indulges in mild delirium …. He feels like an escaped lunatic.”

Indeed do we not feel madly liberated, as spring bursts upon us in delirious abandon? Trees just weeks ago bare now brim with color. The woods are carpeted with flowers: delicate sprays of toothwort; pink lined spring-beauties; starry white bloodroot; nodding yellow trout lilies; bluebells that ring bluer than blue; naughty yellow Dutchmen’s breeches; shy ground-hugging trailing arbutus; spritely spikes of Canada mayflower; stately jackin- the-pulpit; hepatica, anenome, and violets galore.

All that activity, all that newness, all that life-affirming newborn sensual wildness – what do we do with it? It’s human instinct to do something, to connect with the world by taking action. Out forebears knew what to do. They’d go a-Maying. Dressed in green, bedecked by blooms, they’d become the flowering plants that defined spring.

The disappearance of Maying – as a very word – leaves a void: one filled, inevitably, by commerce. What can we do with spring fever but go to a garden center and buy mulch?

Reading these writers of a century or so ago using a word that has lost its meaning is like discovering a trunk of toys that let us play again. Oh, that’s what I can do.

It’s time to go a-Maying again. It’s free. It’s fun. It’s all about flowers. Go out to woods and meadows, gather some flowers, wear them in your hair, or better yet, adorn your friend’s hair. Indulge in some wild delirium.

Cautionary footnote: Ironically, before the tradition of gathering wildflowers in May was forgotten, there were more flowers growing in more places than there are today. So …. to make sure the flowers will outlive this reborn tradition, we must temper our delirium with a dewdrop of reason.

Gather flowers in rights-of-way, not in protected parks; pick only where they’re abundant, and don’t take more than your share – indeed, one symbolic flower can represent all the others. Consider gathering flowers with camera or crayon. Let every flower loose a creative thought for honoring its existence.