In these later years of my life, every lovely thing is more lovely.   So I love the lovely month of May, when we are at last surrounded by a world green, growing, and sensuous.   I think of A.E. Housman’s wonderful poem about spring’s blooming:

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now 
Is hung with bloom along the bough, 
And stands about the woodland ride 
Wearing white for Eastertide. 
 
Now, of my threescore years and ten,         
Twenty will not come again, 
And take from seventy springs a score, 
It only leaves me fifty more. 
 
And since to look at things in bloom 
Fifty springs are little room,        
About the woodlands I will go 
To see the cherry hung with snow.

And I think of that wonderful madrigal, which has kept a place in my brain’s hard drive since high school:

 Now is the month of maying,
 When merry lads are playing, fa la,
 Each with his bonny lass
 Upon the greeny grass. Fa la.

I am full of “fa-la-las” in May.  It sometimes makes my heart ache to walk down the street on a sunny May afternoon,  smelling the earth and the sweet scent of lilacs and lilies-of-the-valley, and knowing that I am blessed to be alive at this exact moment in time.  

And I am blessed that my anniversary is in this merry month of May.  Perhaps you won’t find me with my bonny lass on the greeny grass if you walk past the parsonage in the next weeks, but you will find me full of love, rich as cherry blossoms.  And that love makes me promise  things that will make my bonny lass happy.

One of those things that she has asked for on the occasion of our anniversary is to have a dumpster delivered to the driveway of the parsonage, so we can fill it with the accumulated junk of 18 years of marriage and many more years of life.   She says that this will make her feel lighter, less burdened by all the stuff that takes up room in our house.  It is a spiritual act, if truth be told, because our hearts and our God call us to simplify our lives, to unbind ourselves from the things that stifle our freedom, our creativity, and our peace. 

So don’t be surprised if you see that big old dumpster out there someday soon.   I will have a hard time parting with some of my stuff.   How will I decide which of my hundreds of books I should give to the library?  Or how can I throw out the broken garden tools that someday I might be able to fix?  Or how about the barrel plane that once belonged to my great-grandfather;  the sculpture of me done by my son Adam and labeled “Ward Cleaver”; the stuffed bear with a Cubs uniform brought back from Wrigley Field by my brother-in-law Brian;  the four-inch geode atop by desk waiting to be split open to reveal the quartz crystals inside; the jar of marbles which are the last physical connection with my Great Uncle Emil, my saint of the prairie; or the Santa Claus in the hula skirt that came back with us on our glorious vacation to Hawaii.   How can I part with the baseball signed by Bill Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe on which the movie Field of Dreams was based.  (“Is this heaven?”  “No, it’s Iowa!”) 

In the end, of course, all these things will have no meaning at all when I am gone.   They are the relics of a lifetime, whose beauty and value is mostly to me and to no one else.   Eventually I will have to let them all go, and perhaps this lovely May is as good a time as any to do so.    The resurrection is a promise that what is truly valuable can not be lost.    Jesus’ friends longed to hold on to him.   They wanted to keep him in the flesh.   They wanted to know that his familiar hand would always be there to hold, his kind face always there to smile on them.   The Gospel of John says that he had breakfast with them one day on the beach before he left for good.   Perhaps the sun was glittering on the water, and the gulls were high up in the sky, and the robins were singing their morning song.   Maybe the wind was blowing through the long grass, and somewhere someone was planting lettuce or walking through the woodlands hung with snow. 

I imagine that he told them to love it all, to look for him on such beautiful days.   I imagine he told them to forget the small stuff, because something bigger and better was yet to come.

Faithfully yours,

Tim