May’s furious show of sound and color

If December is a suite by Tchaikovsky and July a Sousa march, the soundtrack of May is a film score by the likes of Howard Shore. The movements come fast and furious, making the transition from fiddlehead to frond in just 24 hours. Grass greens and leaves unfurl and before you know it the landscape has changed from the ground up. You can almost see this time-lapsed transformation in real time. 

May comes in with trillium and trout lily and ends with mountain laurel. In between are the bright notes of the rarest of flowers, the yellow ladyslippers of our seepage wetlands, and in the red riot of columbine. It is insistent and overpowering as it sifts through the air in tree pollen so thick it coats our cars and lungs. 

The first, furtive movements of early bloodroot have cast their petals aside. The canopy closes above the ephemeral wildflowers, while out in the orchard the apple blossoms rain down in the wind. 

There are echoes in this music of lost themes, too. At the turn of the 20th century, the white drifts of chestnut flowers would have seemed like snow in May, but these, like the passenger pigeons that once darkened our skies in hundreds of millions, are now gone beyond recall. Does the fen remember the mastodon whose fossils lie deep in its peat, as the very land rebounds from the long receded press of ice? 

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In a year less dry, the high wind and thunderheads of a late May afternoon would add to the drama. Tension builds as the dark clouds roil in the west and spill over the mountainside in a shattering crescendo. 

We need the rain and feel the lack. Its absence will slow the smallest streams to a trickle, and dry the vernal pools before their time. We who live in a green land do not experience the kind of drought they have in the West, but our trees as well as our gardens suffer in dry years. The wilting leaves are a somber note, a reminder in this time of renewal that some lives are cut short and all things come to an end in time.

The soundtrack of May is the trill of the house wrens that vie for the best nesting boxes, and the liquid warble of the wood thrush from deep in the shadows of the trees. It is the metallic crack of the aluminum bat and the rasp and restless growl of lawnmowers. It is my neighbor tuning his muscle car too early on a Sunday morning and the relief I feel when he rumbles away down the street. It is the sound of the sprayer bringing my grateful plants back to life at the end of the garden hose.

This is busy music, full of jump cuts and embellishments. And it is happening right now, even in the stillness of a quite morning, for those who stop and listen.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.