The spring wildflowers of my childhood were all spring beauties or May flowers. It would be many years later that I learned there actually was a flower called spring beauty, but that May flowers weren’t the name of a particular flower, rather a general term for any wildflower blooming in May.
My childhood days included picking the spring flowers for May baskets. I’m sure I picked spring beauties along with others I would come to identify, such as hepatica and bloodroot. Now, memories fill me when I see the emerging whites and pinks of flower petals in the greening woodlands and along trails.
It’s May Day today. When I was a kid the May Day tradition was encouraged by teachers with an activity project. I rushed home from school in the late afternoon, disappeared in the woods for a time and returned with wildflowers in a small paper basket made in school. I proudly presented them to my mother, who gushed over their beauty and my thoughtfulness. (Many times my dad had already picked flowers, and mom would have two bouquets.)
Then, at the urging of my mother, I picked another handful and arranged them in a small basket my mother supplied. She thought it would be nice to take them to the elderly woman across the road. I happily obliged, for there was a prize for my surprise delivery.
I handed my offering to the neighbor woman. In return, there were cookies and, more importantly, a scooter that was once their children’s waiting for me to ride. She told me, as she had many times, where the scooter was behind the thick white door of an old shed.
With one foot on the scooter and the other kicking up dust and momentum, I passed their barn on my way to a creek that slipped beneath the driveway. There, I lingered a bit to look for frogs. Then I returned the scooter to the shed, where it would be tucked safely away in the darkness until maybe another ride that summer, or surely next May Day.
The years went by, and our elderly farm neighbors passed the farm along to their son’s family and moved to town. I moved, too, and many May Days I wasn’t home to bring wildflowers—always “nice ones”—to my mom. But at some point during the spring I would. The tradition continued in one form or another. Until last year.
My mother is gone now. But I remember. I hope anyone with a mother or grandmother, or a friend, thinks about showing the kindness of a May basket today. Or any day in May would be fine.