Spring Finally Arrived!

Aren't these little wildflowers pretty? This picture was taken up at Cades Cove, not far from here. Well, to be honest, we haven't seen snow for several weeks. What you can't hear is my sigh of relief.  Daylight Savings Time arrived and everyone I know survived it--whether we thought we would or not. Easter past us by last Sunday--and it was a lovely day for the holiday. I didn't fix a ham--or even Cornish hens. I made Pork Chops Lombardy and they were fabulous. (Even if I do say so myself....)

​Now I'm looking forward to May Day. Do you know anything about it? We celebrated it when I was a child. Everybody had at least one nice neighbor who actually liked little kids. So they got our May baskets. I always made two of them and pounded on my own front door so my mother could act surprised when I ripped her from what ever task she'd been at when the door knocking occurred. She probably heard me giggling and trying hard not to. She probably also recognized her roses that were stuffed inside the little cone-shaped basket. Anyway, we had a nice next door neighbor lady, too. Mrs. Boydston liked all of us, too--at least she acted as if she did. Poor women, Others liked them as much as I did. So they spent their morning answering the door and acting surprised. (Like neither of them could hear us giggling.)

​By the way, this was the very same mother who made my brother and me watch while she cut a switch off the elm tree to whack us with when we misbehaved. She was lucky none of these episodes ever occurred around either Mother's Day or May Day. I wonder if there was some significance to that???

​So, back to May baskets. Ours weren't professionally done. We used construction paper and blunt-tipped scissors to fashion them. I liked pink construction paper--which worked out well since a lot of the flowers were the first roses that bloomed in the spring. And they were invariably pink. You've seen pictures of this same May basket here in the past, but I think it's pretty so it's unlikely the last time. Needless to say, none of our baskets had pretty pink ribbons for handles. I would shudder to think how grubby those would have been after having been dragged home on the school bus by a bunch of  little children. It was a nice little project, though. Except for my mother's denuded rose bushes that supplied all the roses.