Yesterday at the island May Day celebration
I remember my mother telling me that very early in the morning on May Day, she and other kids would make May baskets out of reeds, and then fill them with flowers and hang them on neighbors’ front doors.
Yesterday the rain held off for the space of a wedding, a maypole dance, someone’s 90th birthday, and an outdoor pig roast. Hurray for spring!
This is when we left for our errands yesterday morning.
And the ride over to Orcas was rough once we got out into the middle of the channel. I took this photo before we started really pitching and tossing around.
Riding through the dawn
Bob and I had appointments in late morning for our pre-travel vaccinations, but the boat schedule depends on more than just our needs — thus, the early departure. The wind was still strong, and my neighbor and I just kept on talking in order not to feel uneasy while the boat climbed up and slid down the sides of waves. Bob and Mike (the captain) of course were wholly unruffled. We got pretty wet from spray, but that doesn’t matter. I tried to shield the camera while I took photos.
This gives a better sense of the water
We made it ok, just a bit dampened. But before Bob and I started out on our own scramble of post office, clinic, copy shop, food store, laundromat, he stopped to help one of the other passengers who (in rushing to make a ferry to the mainland) had locked her keys in her running car. It took the assembled helpers fifteen or twenty minutes to break into the car with a coat hanger and open one of the power windows.
breaking and entering, all part of the day's chores
And now it’s the following day, I’m back home, my arms are sore from shots, and I still have a bajillion things to do. Onwards.
Wind is spilling out of all the trees, making the night noisy. We’re supposed to be on a 7:30 am boat tomorrow, to go to Orcas for vaccinations. It’ll barely even be light at that hour and we’ll be hauling our bags of trash and recycling down the ramp, and shivering.
The heat of the bonfire was on our faces, all of us gathering just above the beach, and counting down seconds til midnight. The kids were dragging more driftwood up, to throw onto the flames and make showers of sparks, until they were stopped so the fire wouldn’t be so huge it would need someone to stay up all night watching it. Little pads of paper and pens circulated, so people could write something they wanted to burn up in the fire at the turning of the year, and just at midnight someone set off an (illegal) firework down on the beach that shot colored sparks up into the cold dark sky, and we were all so glad to be there together.
Up at the house, the wonderful warm house, every surface laden with potluck abundance to make your head spin: wine, cake, cheeses, pie, fish, lasagne, candy, champagne, fresh-pressed apple juice, home-made breads, soups, nuts, liqueurs… even pomegranate seeds. Twinkling lights and shadowed corners, the house so warm from the woodstove that people migrated out to the porch to cool off and tell jokes and fill glasses (the various bottles mostly outdoors to stay cold).
Kids running out into the night, playing on the tire swing in the bonfire light, going down onto the dark beach where full moon through clouds was the only light. Teenagers gathering in fine dark places, the bonfire or anywhere else private, plenty of shadows to find. Some of us in masks and flowers and finery, most in ordinary sweaters and jeans. Toddler asleep under the Christmas tree that was actually a sculpture of driftwood and moss and lights.
The quality of closeness — how to even explain? Most of us there bound to others by blood or custom or proximity over decades. Children you still remember as preschoolers, now there with their own babies, the web of individual linking threads of history. How many parties even happen now where grade school children, teenagers, people of every generation all the way up to those in their 70’s and 80’s, all throw themselves equally into the celebration?
And the children move through firelight and mystery. There are no separate “children’s activities”, no (god forbid) videos set up to keep them segregated, no amusements arranged beyond the dark, the fire, the beach, the whole true glorious occasion. And we clapped for the retiring post-mistress, who was there with flowers on, all of us marking the passing of time and knowing with one glance at each other whole worlds which we’d seen together and it’s New Year’s now and hurray!
Because the beauty of this place…
…still takes my breath away.