Last evening, first of May, we found on our doorstep a bouquet of fragrant Wisteria blooms and homemade decorated cookie birds -- or maybe bees? A May Basket in effect. From a neighbor. Wonderful!
"What's a May Basket" Ann asked.
When I was a kid in Ohio, in the late thirties, I made paper May Baskets with Mom, filled them with some blossoms and left them anonymously on neighbor's porches. We had real porches in our neighborhood in Akron. Porches seem to be going the way May Baskets have.
Our first grade class in 1941 made May Baskets out of construction paper and mucilage (anyone remember mucilage? You know -- in the brown, squat bottle with the rubber nipple that got all sticky and yucky? Yes?: welcome ag'ed person.) We took the baskets home and gave them to our mothers. I picked flowers from a neighbor's garden to put in my basket on the way home; my Mom, asking where I got them, made me go back and apologize to the neighbor. Always a lesson, even in a May Basket.
By May 1st of '42, it was a different world. We lived in a rented crackerbox of a house in St. Pete, on an unpaved road in the middle of a palmetto lot. The War Dept. had assigned Dad to the construction project turning Tampa's MacDill Field into a US Army Air Force base. May Baskets a thing of the past.
They never came back after the war, probably because of the nations' bug-a-boos about socialism and communism. May 1st, after all, was International Labor Day, adopted in the 1890's as a day commemorating Haymarket Square and celebrated throughout Europe, especially in the USSR, as a day of international socialist and unionist anti-capitalist solidarity. You weren't supposed to be dancing but singing L'Internationale.
(Ann knew about Haymarket Square from her labor history courses in UW's Access Program. She knows the important stuff; I know the frivolous. )
May Day celebrations were common throughout Europe -- maypoles, May Queens -- post-Easter celebrations of Spring. 1930's Akron was a salad bowl of foreign-born and first generation European Americans from nearly every country; their homeland traditions on display at any opportunity. I wonder if maypoles are still danced around and baskets delivered anonymously and May Queens blushing on the village greens of Europe? Probably not.
Here in Seattle yesterday, the annual May Day parade of anti-WTO'ers, socialists, unionists, solidarity- ists against something or other was turned into a motorcade, everyone in their auto-bubble. The novel-virus triumphs at a time we need international solidarity for somethings more than ever. Mayday! mayday! mayday!*
The virus-induced social isolation certainly gave Jen and her kids time to bake, pick and deliver May welcomes to their neighbors. We were delighted to have one. Thanks -- for the gesture of solidarity, for the goodies, for the memories.
Happy Spring, everyone! Stay safe; stay well; we'll be able to dance around a maypole together one day.
* About mayday, the international call for help: it comes from the air transport days of the early 1920's (Wikipedia tells me), an Anglicized version of the French m'aider.
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