May 2002

May is a month for dreaming. The rich fulfillment of summer is not yet come, and the stern reality of winter is one with all time past. Winter, I think, has the frosty visage of a Puritan, and has no traffic with light-mindedness, And summer is like a Greek goddess, templed in green and robed in moon-silver, but she carries in her hand the dark secret seed of sorrow, for she forecasts beauty that must die.

But May is enchantment without shadow, May is the sweetness of love and the mystery of blossoming. And in May the faerie folk come back to our New England hills from the lands beyond the sunset. For they like May too!

--Gladys Taber

May is the month we celebrate motherhood and our mothers. I lost my dear mom to cancer over four years ago, but still a day never passes that I don't think of her and "ask" her for advice. I somehow feel our strong earthly connection continues on to the spiritual world. I'm one that believes that the relationships we make on earth, are available to us after we die. Otherwise, our existence would seem meaningless. So, I continue to seek mom's advice out and consider what she would tell me or want me to do.

Recently, I have needed mom's advice a lot. When I do, I think of her and what she would have expected me to do and carry through with it. The love of a mother and her sound advice carries on forever. I am blessed to have had a wonderful woman to be my mother.

Thanks mom!

Well, here it is, Memorial Weekend, the official start of the summer season. Many schools are already out. (ours goes until the 31st)

Our town has many military memorial services and flags are flying everywhere. We live in a very patriotic city. Its become a tradition here to put a flag pole near the curb and literally line the streets with American flags on patriotic holidays.

Then we have Funfest. Its a three-day community celebration in our biggest park (with adjacent amusement park). Its three days of fun, food and music, arts and crafts, etc. The children can make something wonderful in the woodpile to take home, have their face painted, enter Big Wheel races and dig for buried treasure in a huge pile of sand. Adults my inadvertently end up in the middle of a water pistol barrage or have a confetti egg cracked upon their head. The entertainment is top name recording artists and food booths are everywhere.

When I was a kid, Memorial Day meant going to grandma's and helping her go through her two acres of flower beds (she was a master gardener) and select beautiful flowers to put in canning jars to take to the cemeteries and lay them on the graves of family and friends. Grandma and Grandpa would always say a prayer at each gravesite and then tell us about the departed loved one.

After we visited the cemeteries, we always had a big family meal with uncles, aunts and cousins at grandma and grandpa's house. Everyone brought food and grandma would always include some of her famous homemade pickles and bread. The food was piled on the huge dining table and we would eat buffet style and carry our plates to the huge wrap around porch of their house and sit on the steps, one of the rockers or porch swings that were at each end or a quilt on the grass.

The house was one of the oldest and largest homes in Cache Valley Utah. It was an pioneer home built by my great grandparents who immigrated from Denmark to the United States after they joined the Mormon church. The house was on 2 acres of grounds that was mostly flowers except for a good-sized pine wooded area that my mom and her sisters called "Jobba".

Jobba was where my mom and her two sisters (dubbed The Three Graces, by my grandfather) played with their imaginations at full speed. It was an "enchanted forest" of tall pines, a thick carpet of pine needles on the ground with wild flowers in abundance where the patches of sunlight shone through. At the edge of the forest was a high hill and on top of the hill stood the Logan LDS Temple, The temple, with its tall towers, further added to the idea that Jobba was indeed enchanted"--complete with a castle overlooking it. As all perfect forests do, Jobba also had a stream of clear icy mountain water running through it that started somewhere up the canyon. Mom and her sisters would make little boats out of hollowed-out cucumbers, make masts and sails from scraps and send them speeding down the "river Jobba" to discover new worlds.

My cousin and I liked the idea of the magic enchanted forest and we would rummage through grandma's "dress up" trunk and transform ourselves into fairy princesses. I had long hair, but my cousin didn't and she was certain that all true fairy princesses had long flowing tresses. So she would go through grandma's rag bag and take long strips of cloth and fashion them into braids and pin them to her hair to give her the right look of a fairy princess. Grandma would allow us to make flower garlands for our hair and then we would spend the day in our "pretend" princess garb and grant wishes and dream to our heart's content. Of course, my brothers enjoyed teasing us--which normally would end up with us turning them into toads.

Now, many, many years later, I find I am not really a fairy princess. Memorial Days gone by are all in the past, but I have such pleasant memories that will live on forever. That is magic in itself!

--Sadie