Wednesday, May 02, 2007, 06:30

The First of May

Tuesday was the very definition of May Day here at Rural Route 2. If they put colored pictures in the dictionary, then this would be the picture they would put next to May Day.

Monday night it rained. Quite a bit of thunder and lightning, but only 2/10 of an inch of rain. Tuesday morning it was very foggy. I had a meeting at 7:30 a.m. to cover for the newspaper, and when I got out of the meeting at 9 a.m., it was still foggy. When I left the office at 10 a.m. to do an interview (a three-year-old volunteer at a nursing home!), the fog was thinning. And by the time I went back to the office at 11 a.m., the day had turned glorious.

For the rest of Tuesday -- the first of May -- the sun was shining, the sky was a clear cloudless blue and there was a strong wind out of the west. The lightning and little bit of rain the night before convinced the grass to turn the brilliant green that only grass can be in May. A green so bright that it almost hurts your eyes.

The leaves are starting to pop out on the trees, too. And soon the green leaves will add another dimension of green to the landscape.

How long everything will remain green is unknown for right now. If we persist in only getting a few tenths of an inch of rain every couple of weeks, the green will soon tarnish and turn dull. But for the moment -- hope is shining through in the grass that's turning green and the leaves that are beginning to show on the trees.

Happy May! The month of Mother's Day, and high school graduations and Memorial Day.

Memorial Day? So soon?

Okay, so now what I want to know is -- what happened to April? April always goes by much too fast, as far as I am concerned.

LeAnn R. Ralph