Springtime Months !free! -

May arrives with confidence and an almost overwhelming abundance. The caution of April is forgotten. The world is no longer “becoming” green; it is green—a hundred shades of it, from the dark, waxy holly to the bright, acidic hue of new oak leaves. The trees are fully clothed, the canopy closes overhead, and the forest floor becomes a dappled sanctuary. The temperature, no longer a gamble, settles into a benevolent warmth.

May is the month of sensual overload. The fragrance is intoxicating: lilac, lily-of-the-valley, and the heady, almost cloying sweetness of hawthorn blossom, known in folklore as the “Mayflower.” The insects have arrived in force—bees drone lazily among the azaleas and rhododendrons, and the first damselflies skim over ponds. The pace of life accelerates. Farmers rush to plant the last of their crops; city parks fill with sunbathers and the sound of laughter. This is the spring of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Keats’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (though he was describing autumn, the feeling of ripe abundance is similar). May has no time for the melancholy of April. It is a month of weddings, of proms, of outdoor festivals. It looks forward to summer, its younger, hotter sibling, but retains the fresh, new-mown hay quality of its own season. It is spring at its climax, the full stop at the end of the sentence that March began. springtime months

March arrives not as a gentle whisper but as a clashing of cymbals. Its astrological symbol, the Ram, is fitting, for this month butts its head against the receding fortress of winter. The old season does not retreat gracefully; it fights a rearguard action of late snows, biting frosts, and gray skies. Yet, March’s defining characteristic is its radical unpredictability. As the proverb goes, it “comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb,” though the transition is rarely so tidy. One day, a “lion” wind may howl, stripping tree limbs bare; the next, a “lamb” sun melts the icicles into a thousand dripping melodies. May arrives with confidence and an almost overwhelming