"May"

 The photo: flowers outside our entrance at Essex Meadows, welcoming us to spring and to the month.

 

Amidst all the turmoil in the world, it is nice to take a moment to reflect on the month of May, and on our great good luck to be living in this nation at this time.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“May”

May 1, 2026

 

“There is May in books forever;

May will part from Spencer never;

May’s in Milton, May’s in Prior,

May’s in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer,

May’s in all the Italian books: – 
She has old and modern nooks...”

                                                                                                                “May and the Poets,” c.1812

                                                                                                                Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

 

May is named for the Roman goddess Maia, daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes; thus the right month to celebrate Mothers’ Day, as we will on May 10. Maia was the nurturer of plants and was associated with fertility and springtime. Students, cooped up in dorms and classrooms during the long winter, would, on the first of May, chant: “Hooray! Hooray! Outdoor sporting starts today!” It is a month when newly-blossomed flowers offer thanks for April’s showers. It is the month for graduations – a granddaughter’s from high school this year, along with a granddaughter and grandson from college. It is the month in which my parents were married eighty-eight years ago, and one in which a brother and granddaughter were born. 

 

While the summer solstice arrives on June 21, whiffs of summer appear in May. It is when Connecticut’s state flower, mountain laurel, bursts into bloom, and when lilacs and rhododendrons provide fragrance to a newly-wakened Earth. It is when trees become fully clothed, in their summer-green finery.

 

May Day, the first of May, commemorates the fight for labor rights. Its origin stems from the May 4, 1886 Chicago Haymarket Affair, when a confrontation between striking workers, primarily from the McCormick Harvester Machine Company, and the police turned violent. It was a date usurped by the Soviet Union to display socialist solidarity, industrial achievements and military strength. As an aside, the distress signal “Mayday! Mayday!” has nothing to do with the month. Instead, it originates from the French phrase m’aider! m’aider!, meaning help me.   

 

May is a month celebrated by poets, like Leigh Hunt, in the epigraph above, and a month noted in history: On May 10, 1869 the Golden Spike was driven into a rail tie at Council Bluffs, Utah, completing the first transcontinental railroad. Sixty-two years later, on May 1, 1931, construction on the Empire State – then the world’s tallest building – was completed. After causing the deaths of almost 40 million people over five and a half years, Victory in Europe arrived on May 8, 1945. Nine years later, on May 6, 1954, medical student Roger Bannister, became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. And on May 25, 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon. Five years later, on May 30, 1966, the unmanned Surveyor 1 landed on the moon. (It would be another three years and two months – July 20, 1969 – before Neil Armstrong and Aldrin actually walked on the moon.)

 

.............................................................................

 

And, as this essay was begun on a cold March day, I know that one of the best things about May is that it is not March.