Now ya see me - Now ya don't

A couple more days

and we’ll be in the month of May. May has always seemed to be an invisible month for me – the adjunct to a song about April showers. Maybe it’s because April being poetry month is usually a busy time around here or maybe it goes back to school days – May being that last full month before summer break – a time for turning in text books – washing the blackboard – final tests – film strips and thumb twiddling in bare walled classrooms.

Even May’s holiday, Memorial Day, comes at the end of the month skipping over ninety percent of the month’s days like absentmindedly stepping over a springtime puddle.

Maybe it’s the transformational qualities of the month – nobody spends a whole lot of time staring at a cocoon. We predict weather with caterpillars and plant gardens to attract butterflies but don’t notice the chrysalis affixed to a milkweed stem. The bitter cold of February or the melting swelter of an August afternoon can turn our heads – but the not really cold and not really hot sweatshirty kind of weather of this month just doesn’t snatch one’s attention.

The month of May is the low man on the calendar pole, a place holder, the opening band that nobody remembers once the headliners hit the stage.

May – a month to get through.

PRESS PRESS - PULL

My Grandma kept everything.

Below is a combination of the pics from my first newspaper feature back in 1987 (found in one of Grandma's trunks) and another from a month or so ago.

Sara asked me if I'd give the kid sitting next to me the time of day.
I'm still thinking about it.

Extra points to anyone who can guess the allusion in the title.

what 36 years can do to a guy

Before

After

Today my son and I will be relocating some live chickens. Hopefully this will be uneventful - but there is some potential for unforeseen catastrophe.

update: The chicken moving escapade was pretty anticlimatic - while the premise was I Love Lucy rerun worthy - we put a couple chickens in dog carriers, drove them 40 miles in the back of my Honda Elelment - then set them loose in my sister's chicken pen along with a couple dozen of her own fowl. No harrowing escapes in the auto - no fighting with new chicken pen mates - no chickens attached to anyone's face as they stumbled around a pasture - nothing.