May Baskets

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Bernice Paglia

The First of May, as our grandparents knew, begs a holiday. Easter, the occasion for once-a-year dresses in our parents’ and grandparents’ day, is weeks in the past. April Fools was a blip, a gimmick – a bad joke or an out-of-character, left-handed scheme born of too many cocktails. Memorial Day, meanwhile, waits weeks away, beckoning with a three-day weekend if you work in the city, but promising only more time for field cultivating if your kin farm, as mine do.

Midwest farm kids both, my folks initiated us early to the mysterious rites of May, when the corn first sends its green shoot up through the good black earth – a little, vegetable maypole – and the green haze of crops gradually overspreads our Grant Wood hillsides. For us, it was usually our first time out in a light jacket, or, if we were lucky, in long sleeves, and we were feeling our oats. May Day, as we celebrated it some 30-odd years ago, proved a day tailor made for the historical moment – the Dr. Spock epoch when an enterprising parent could take two or three or four rambunctious munchkins, give them a stack of waxy paper cups, hand-picked flowers from the garden, a bunch of bagged candy, and some homemade popcorn or peanuts to shell, and create for them a “learning experience.” A paper-punch and a pipe cleaner later you had, small enough for a child’s wee hand, a cup and a handle with which you could hold May – and pass its prodigality along for the sharing.

But the best part of May Day wasn’t stuffing cups, it was the hocus-pocus disappearing act awaiting us just the other side of the doorbells we’d ring. Into the car we scrambled with a cardboard flat full of overflowing paper cup “baskets,” making Mom slow down for the tight curves on the road into town for fear our cups would runneth over. Like Santa, we made our list, populated it with both the naughty and nice, and headed off to town, where our aunts and most of our school friends waited: sitting, city ducks.

When we arrived, Mom’s old Olds idling in someone else’s drive, one of us little imps, crouching low like a solider in a combat zone, would race around the car, scamper to the door, ring the doorbell, and beat it the heck back to the back seat, the car already rolling when we slammed the door shut. We would rubberneck around to watch our sweet, half-suspecting victims open the door and blink into the sun – like Punxsutawney Phil on the second of February – before reaching down for the little grail we’d filled. It was like fair-weather trick or treating, only better, without any of the “oh my, how scary you children look” play acting. Who wanted to perform like a circus monkey for an adult when you could have it your way, ring the doorbell, disappear like the Invisible Man, then stick around to watch the grayhairs scratch their salt and pepper at your miraculous front-door offering?