may...still making up its mind

Things around here are growing like crazy with all the rain and (occasional) sunshine.

After our brutal winter, we Mainers feel we deserve this spring, with its technicolor green grass and impossible-to-imagine-a-month-ago real and actual flowers.

I love May.  It might be one of my favorite months.  It is long, often has an extra pay check in its 5 week depths, is noted for stretches of sunny, chlorophylll-filled sunshine, allows for sleeping with the windows open, stands on the brink of summer, is the month of the tulips. daffodils and (my heart beat still) the lilacs, brags of no bugs, permits most of us to hang up the canvas wood  bag and cease the constant chopping of kindling.  Plus,  I've come to think of it as marathon month.

Yet so far this May is sort of getting on my nerves.   Just when I sigh into the warm days of capri pants and running in shorts, the chill sets in and the wood stove needs to be fired up.  Perhaps I'm just cranky because the last many 10 day forecasts have called for gray spotted with rain.  This is like forecasting for Mainers cranky with a chance of bitchy. In all actuality, May is probably always this fickle, albeit it normally a bit more sunny, but this year I just don't have the patience for it.

Don't get me wrong.  I do appreciate the outward movement of our family outside and the flowers blooming in the garden.  But the last 2 days have been brisk and dark and today it is just pouring.  Skirts on hold, pull out the sweaters, turn on the pellet stove, heat up some soup.

I'm trying to reframe my mind and think of it as money in the weather bank, insurance buying us a beautiful running day for Sunday when we tackle 26.2. 

And, just so I don't lose sight entirely....these spectacular sights are appearing in our very own yard.

 (My Mother's Day calla lily.)

And the promise of all that is still to come.

Other things are growing like weeds around here as well...

This picture perfectly captures one of the many complex dynamics between our girls - the offering by Ella and the pout by Maya-  positions that can turn like a tide. Like May, our girls can be very fickle with each other.  Good thing they are in it for the long haul.