Note: I'm doubling up this week so I can post about Beltane on Beltane, and so that I don't fall behind.-D.
Happy Beltane, our day of music, love, and the Maypole. Except this year, for the first time, I didn't get to do the Maypole Dance. I had to content myself with helping to make music, which, by the way, I don't really know how to do. I banged away on a skin drum, despite having no sense of rhythm, and at least nobody made fun of me for it.
I'd intended to dance, and I'd been looking forward to it, but there just weren't enough ribbons. Participants each hold a ribbon and everyone weaves the ribbons around the pole as they dance. And there are more students than ribbons. The yearlings get first dibs on the ribbons, and after that it's first come, first served, and I came too late to be served a ribbon at all. I suppose I've had my share, and more than my share, to have danced for so many years running, and that it is someone else's turn, now, but I was still disappointed.
The day was warm and breezy, though clouds mostly obscured the sun until late in the day. A little over a week ago, it was snowing, but today felt legitimately like the first day of some species of summer. Most of the leaves, while not quite full-size, are large enough that the forests are turning green, and the puddles that formed and then subsided in the weekend's rain left a greenish coating of pollen in the low spots of the driveways of campus.
The trees are having a merry May Day, anyway.
Each Beltane is a little different, I find. It's the most variable, the least traditional, of our holidays here. Some years there are two, or even three dances, so different groups of people can get involved. Some years there are concerts or mystery plays. This year, we had only the one dance, though the masters seemed to have partnered up for the day, so I assume they had their own Maypole Dance in private, earlier--as you may recall, the dance is always used to randomly assign partners for the chores to get ready for the feast. The sprouts did not dance at all, but they were present and they were involved. They had, of all things, a mini-science fair, a series of displays they made themselves on the reproduction of various farm animals. Like last year, the music, aside from the Dance itself, took the form of a children's concert. Sarah is still in her ascendancy.
But some things are always the same. There is always the blessing of the animals (by a Catholic priest), and there is always the feast at the end of the day, held out of doors as the sun sets and the night deepens, capped by the various partners all taking a moment to publicly appreciate each other, and then couples dancing afterwards.
I'd really been looking forward to the appreciation thing. You have to figure out something good to say about your partner, even though you might hardly know them at all. Or, if you do know the well, you have to say the kind things you were thinking, but maybe were too shy to say. Since I'm often too shy, I appreciate being pushed a bit. But since I hadn't danced, I had no partner for the day, so I had no place in the appreciation ritual.
I felt ready to pop with all the things I suddenly wasn't being forced to say.
"You can say nice things about people anyway," said June, while we were dancing. I hadn't said anything to her about it, she just knew.
"No, I can't," I said. "I'd look silly."
"You look silly anyway."
"That's true."
"You can say nice things to me," she prompted.
"Always and forever," I said.
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