May is Compelled to Create
whether we thank her for it or not
April leaves the house in tears, as she so often does.
Not the sad variety. The other kind. The expectant, joyful kind. Flowing tears of optimism, the gush of which my aging, rusting gutters can barely keep up with.
It’s been a bit much, to be honest—all that unabashed positivity in such a compact package, and at such a time as this.
As April rides off on her electric scooter, she, waves and says, “I hope you’ll invite me back again!” I have to admit to myself that I certainly will.
I pick up my bucket to pull the first weeds of the season. Not even an hour goes by when I hear the nasally beep of a car horn blurting its way up the road to the house. I don’t think I know the car, but there’s something familiar, though old-fashioned in the sound of the horn. As it draws closer, I stand up and see a gamboge-colored VW Bug pull into the driveway. The Bug parks, the horn still beeping in punctuated tweets.
I don’t recognize the car, but as I walk toward it the driver’s side window rolls down, squeaking as it awkwardly falls into the slot in the door. Finally, I recognize the bright eyes as I hear my name called out in that sweet, warbly voice of hers.
“May!” I shout, opening my arms.
She opens the creaky door of the vintage car, and lumbers out, almost losing her balance. I get a look at her and jump back a little.
“Oh!”
“Yep,“ she says. “I’m knocked up.”
“Wow,” I return, “and, uh … due soon, yes?”
The exaggerated curve of May’s fawn-colored stomach pushes her cropped shirt upward. She pulls at the elastic on her magenta-hued pants, which rest well below her protruding belly button, but the elastic has no more to give. It has expanded to the absolute limit of its physical capabilities.
“Any day, technically.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course not.”
I bring May’s turquoise blue suitcase into the house and apologize for not having washed the bedsheets yet. I explain that April has just left, not even an hour ago.
“How’s our sweet April?” she asks
“Same. I don’t know how she keeps up her optimism. I guess she doesn’t read the news.”
“Did any of that positivity happen to rub off on you?” May asks.
I don’t answer.
I offer her a glass of water. Frizzante. No ice. After exchanging pleasantries May asks to lay down so she can elevate her feet.
“All that driving. I might never see my ankles again.”
I walk her to the guest room, passing The Dog in the entry, who wags his tail but can’t muster the energy to lift his gray muzzle as she approaches.
May stops to rub his head. “Good to see you, old man.”
“I don’t know how much longer he has,” I say, tearing up.
May turns to me, putting one hand on my face and the other on her belly. “Circle of life, my dear friend.”
She ends up napping for most of the afternoon, which, I later realize, will be the only still hours she spends with me.
May’s natural rhythm, undisturbed even by her current condition, means she rises early and goes to bed late. On more than one occasion, she brings me coffee in bed. I tell her that I should be the one delivering a morning cup to her.
“Sleep has never been my forte,” she explains.
It turns out that sitting around, not producing anything is also not her forte. Even May’s smallest, most inconspicuous maneuvers result in construction or a new display. Her craft is multi-disciplinary; she tends to and unveils so much in such a short period of time, I can barely keep up to acknowledge her daily accomplishments, though I try to.
“I heard the barn swallows this morning,” I tell her over lunch one Saturday.
“Have you finally made peace with them building nests on your house?”
I detect a smirk on her face and offer a gentle one back.
“What I think you mean to ask is: Have I made peace with them pooping all over my deck. Right?”
May laughs. “Small price to pay.”
I can’t argue with her.
On more than one occasion, I am tempted to ask her to slow down, to talk her out of doing yet more than she has already done, but I know there is no point. She is compelled to create, and the rest of us will continue to benefit from everything she is willing to do whether we ever thank her for it or not.
Besides, she is terrible at accepting compliments. When I gush over the peonies and the azaleas or tell her how amazed I am by “those little helicopter-looking things on the maples” she swipes her hand in a gesture that means to convey something along the lines of, “It’s no bother, really.”
I admit I don’t know the names of all the flowers, or a great majority of the plants; that I can’t always tell whether a birdsong is coming from a Bewick’s Wren or an Orange-crowned Warbler. Those little helicopter things — I know there must be a scientific name for them, but I don’t know what it is.
“The names of things don’t matter,” she says. She picks up my hand to hold it and looks me right in the eyes. She smiles, and I notice that she smells like wildflowers in the rain: earthy and ethereal all at once. “The names don’t matter. The fact that you have noticed is all that matters.”
The following morning, I announce that I will be making lasagna for dinner that night. I know it’s her favorite. May asks me to make it extra spicy. “Let’s get this little cherub out into the daylight,” she says, rubbing her belly.
For dinner, she wears fuchsia-colored overalls, cut off just below the knees with a lime green t-shirt underneath. I tell her she looks lovely, which is true.
After a while she says, “You know, you shouldn’t confuse a commitment to beige attire with conveying an air of sophistication.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, a little offended.
“I mean: would it be so awful to wear a colored shirt now and then?”
“I wear colors!”
“Black and taupe are not colors. They are moods. And dreary ones for that matter.”
“Black is sophisticated. Besides, I don’t have your forgiving skin tone.”
“Denim is also not a color,” she continued. “It’s a state of mind, and I dig it, but … not a color.”
Now I was annoyed. “Do you want lasagna or not, because I’d be happy to feed this to the raccoons. They’ll love it.”
“I’m just saying…”
“I’m old. I can’t wear what you wear.”
“You’re not old. You’re despondent. You have been for years, and now your wardrobe is reflecting that.”
We were both silent, while I concentrated on grating the thick block of parmesan without slicing my fingers open.
“But yes, I want the lasagna,” she started. “I need the extra calories because I have to start making your Rainier cherries tomorrow morning, and those take a bit of effort. There’s a lot of compression that goes into putting so much flavor into such a small receptacle.”
“Does everyone know about my problem with over-indulging in the cherries?”
“Honey…yes. We all know. And we all think it’s adorable.”
Then she started laughing — her rumbling thunder of a laugh, which was infectious.
I brought the lasagna to the table and shook my head. “You’re impossible,” I said.
“No. I am necessary.”
I put an extra-large slice of lasagna on a plate and handed it to her. I needed her to be adequately fueled for the cherry creation. June is not that far away.
As she swallowed her first bite of lasagna, she looked at me with her blushing face. “Just start with a light blue T-shirt and work your way around the spectrum from there. And that’s the last thing I will say about it.”
And it was.
May had more to say about plenty of other topics over the coming weeks, and much more to do. When she worked, she sighed or sang songs but was never silent. Her output was remarkable. She never slowed down, was newly prolific every day. And whatever she did, whether it was releasing the bees, bats and butterflies, or coaxing the snails and slugs along; whether she was costuming the alders, the maples, cottonwoods, or oaks, she did in full concentration, never letting the effort wear her down. Even when she outfitted the imported ornamentals, she didn’t complain.
“I never would have put that one here, but I can see why you like it,” she would say, as she fluffed up the sourwood.
One afternoon, I ran into her on my way to the garage. She was sitting on a rock, completely naked, reading from a book of haiku to lure the alligator lizards from underneath. The construct of embarrassment at her own body being completely foreign to her, she simply looked up when she saw me, set the book down on her gigantic globe of a belly and whispered, “Sometimes, they only respond to Bashō.”
The next morning, I woke up to the smell of coffee and found May sitting in the chair by the bed, The Dog’s head resting on her leg.
“Good morning,” she said, not looking away from The Dog.
“Morning,” I muttered. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“You have more time,” she said, still looking The Dog in the eyes. I knew what she meant. “Enjoy it.”
I sat up and took my first drink of coffee. May tended to put too much milk in it, but who was I to complain.
“I, however, do not,” she continued. “This cherub is starting to stir, and I need to return to the city.”
“No free birth for you?” I joked.
She chuckled. “Nature is miraculous. But it is also unpredictable and some things you do not leave to chance.”
May grabbed the arms of the chair to hoist herself out of it.
“Let me help you,” I said, as I got out of bed.
I held out my arms for her to grab, which she did for once, and then folded her own around me for a hug. I felt a slither of movement between us.
“Is that—?” I started.
“Yes. Thanks to all that good lasagna.” She kissed me on the cheek and walked out of the room. “We’ll be on our way.”
I brought out her suitcase and put it in the trunk of the Bug, as May folded herself back into the driver’s seat. The first warm morning of the spring spread itself across the yard. As she started backing out of the driveway, she rolled down the window. “I think you’re going to loooove this year’s cherries!”
“Thank you!” I shouted back, laughing.
Then the car stopped and pulled forward again.
“I forgot to tell you. I left something for you on the trail,” she said, then backed out again and beeped the nasally horn again all the way down the road.
I returned to the house, put on proper shoes, and told The Dog I was sorry that he couldn’t come with me. I tried to appease him with the obligatory: “I’ll be back soon.”
Did he ever believe that? Did it matter? What is an hour, what is aloneness to him?
I started on the trail without knowing what I was looking for. And also: what could I possibly be looking for? “Something” out here could be anything, especially from May.
It had been a few weeks since I last walked on the trail. The wood ferns had returned, arching again over the narrow portion of the foot path. The salmonberry and elder were both in full leaf, preparing to fruit. In another two or three weeks, the woods will be so thick with life, I’ll have a hard time seeing the branches and limbs that had fallen during the winter.
Someone once asked me why I don’t remove the dead logs and downed trees from the trail’s view so that it looks better. “Better than a living forest?” I asked.
I took the first switchback to the initial incline, which is also the steepest and the longest. Up ahead the sun was falling on an object which glared in an almost crystal white hue. At the site, I found a billow of mushrooms flowing from the center of a felled trunk, curling upwards in ever smaller and more delicate layers. An intricate, spiral of architecture—this bloom—built out of the crumbling structure of a seemingly dead trunk.
I touched the mushroom’s thin edges, pressed lightly into the soft pillow of one of its cups, being careful not to use too much force. I didn’t want to crush it. What resolve. What ingenuity. What a gift from May, this tribute to the circle of life.
Back at the house, I made myself a second coffee, took a shower and got dressed. Brushing my teeth, I took note of my shirt: a gray button down. I took it off and rummaged through the T-shirt drawer. I filed past the sea of tans, blacks, whites and off-whites. Buried at the bottom, I found a wrinkled, ruby red number, snapped it gently in the air to bring it to life, and put it on.
& also:
In June 2024, I posted what would become the first of my “Visitors” series, where I imagined the month as a houseguest who came every year. At the time, I had no intention of continuing, but after I wrote about July and then August, I was encouraged to go on. I continued up to April 2025, but never got to May, until now.
Thank you for reading.
{| AC