MAY DAY! MAY DAY! Fait Accompli SPRING THINGS!

WE DID IT!

Snow is no more.

Ice has payed the price.

Cold rains have gone down the drain.

The earth has passed its spring equinox. The shamrocks have wilted and April showers have come their way. The cruelest month has done its worst.

May is in full flower.

Spring has surely arrived!


It's time to rejoice in the change in the season and all the beauty it shares. Here are some selected stories about that happy time right here.

Yearly, Newly: A Year with Mama Earth by Rebecca Grabill

We can't feel the earth's turning, but in September the children can see it happening.

Pumpkins peek out from under
wide yellowing leaves.

Hot summer winds turn chill and one morning the first frost is on the grass.

October's pumpkins grin.

By November, squirrels are fat and caterpillars are cocooned, and then...

In December, Mama Earth dons her winter coat.

In January, Winter settles in, wearing that white coat, but not a warm one. But by February, Mother Earth whispers to wake certain shoots, pale but hopeful, and March brings the rise of sap in the trees and the descent of squirrels climbing down to ground to search for stored nuts.

And then --it's May, with all of its promises.

May perfumes Mama Earth. Ferns unfurl their lacy arms
to greet Mama's gentle friend, the sun.
And seedlings push out their first prickly leaves
ripe with promise of fat melons.

And then it's summer--a time that belongs to barefoot kids and fireflies, sudden showers and crickets and summer fun.

By August her children have soaked the sun
right into their bones.

And the earth comes 'round again, in the cycle of the seasons in Rebecca Grabill's A Year with Mama Earth (Eerdman's Books, 2019), as Mother Earth wakes and sleeps through the year's turning. Says author Grabill, "I still love the way each season sings--with its own voice--a melody anyone who listens can hear. Who is the singer? A gentle, fun-loving mother, full of surprises."

It's good to know that as we fret through the seasons, sweaty days, cold rains, falling snows, windy days, and icy puddles, the earth knows what it's doing and where it's going. Grabill's lovely and lyrical words bring the beauty and worth of each season into sharp focus, assisted by Rebecca Green's careful paintings of children and nature through the year. This exceptional book is a first purchase for schools and libraries.

Cycle of the Seasons: Birdsong by Julie Flett

It's a mucky morning as we pack up the last of our belongings and leave our little home in the city by the sea.

For a child, a move to a different place, leaving friends and relatives and her favorite tree in her window behind, is hard. Katharena doesn't even feel like unpacking her drawing things.

But it is spring, and the new little house is surrounded by early snowdrops all in bloom. Soon her mother sends her to meet their neighbor, an elderly woman named Agnes, who welcomes her and show her own clay pottery and sculptures and garden.

There are berries and flowers and so many of her clay things.

"Your mom says you love to draw," said Agnes.

As summer ripens into fall, Katherena and Agnes become fast friends. They prepare the garden for its winter rest, and Agnes says her bones are as creaky as the bare limbs of trees in the wind. She takes Katherena to her studio and shares the new pot she is making, and shares moon lore, and Katherena shares her Cree Indian name for the changing moon.

But as the geese fly away and autumn sinks into the cold of winter, Agnes is not well, and the girl and her mother make salmon soup and take it to her. And even as spring nears, Agnes has no strength to work her garden, or even to go outside to see summer's harbinger, the snowdrops in bloom. But she does have a last gift to give...

Agnes sends me home with a cup full of bulbs--snowdrop bulbs to plant in the field next autumn.

This is a winter's tale, a gentle story that deals with the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life as well, Julie Flett's Birdsong (Greystone Books, 2019) chronicles an unlikely friendship of age and youth and the time that that the two share. In Katherena's own words, the narrative is lovely but spare, powerful in what goes unsaid but not unrevealed in words, but revealed in artist Flett's striking illustrations, done in flat outlines against bright white pages, in a palette limited to blacks and browns, which speaks of the rhythms of the seasons and of the heart.

Life goes on in this meaningful book, published to raves from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal and Horn Book.