Beltane!

Happy May Day!

We've been celebrating by reading Elsa Beskow's delightful The Flowers' Festival and by starting what might become a new tradition.

I loved our spring egg tree and so enjoyed blowing out the eggs and decorating them. As the buds were drying brown on our "tree trunk," it was obviously time to make space for the coming solstice. I had read and heard that we could save the eggs from year to year, and maybe when the children are older and can do their own blown ones (they only worked on the hardboiled eggs this year), we'll save the keepsakes. For now, though, I know I'll want to do at least as many next year and how many eggs do we really need?

They've been hanging on our fairy tree this week--which is in full bloom with deep purple lilacs--and we've been waiting to see what the fairies do with them.

Today--which in addition to being May Day was also Isaiah's first day of a Montessori home-based preschool!--Isaiah and I decided to help the eggs along. We're never far from a bat these days, with baseball fever upon us, so he slugged away at each egg strung up on the tree. Many of them got batted down whole, at which point I pitched them to Isaiah and he smashed them to smithereens in mid-air. I got to do one, too. Fun!

What's next? Skeet shooting?

parading toward equinox

Such an abundance of choices today! They mirror the choices I make for myself and my family each day. We awoke this morning with the possibilities of going to our wonderful synagogue for a super fun Purim festival or to stay in our little town and attend a spring parade party. I was so undecided, I posed (with some hesitancy, given my track record with him when I get wishy-washy) the choice to Isaiah. "Stay in town," he responded with no hesitation. And so we declined the 20-minute drive to an indoor event for a homegrown festival of a few friends.

Delight! Simplicity! We arrived to wand and necklace making out of paper flower cutouts and pipecleaners. We munched on some tasty snacks and planted seeds and seedlings (and I got to share the big box of extra snap pea starts Isaiah I had grown from seed). Actually, the sharing of my peas was a highlight. A farmer friend thanked me profusely because her family hadn't gotten around to planting their peas yet! If you know me and my total lack of garden know-how despite having just lived on a farm for the past year, you know this made my week! I guess I did learn one important lesson on the farm...the plants don't wait on your schedule. You make the time when it is their time, you squeeze it in, you make it happen. Probably a good first garden lesson to learn. We'll see how it goes when watering time comes along.

Then we paraded through town, most children on foot. Mine and TQ cozied in the wagon, ringing their bells and shaking those blossoms right out of their buds. We made enough noise of our own, traipsing past the post office and through the coffee shop, we needed no audience. We paraded for the sheer joy of it. Celebration! And as some children twirled their groggers, I was reminded yet again that to me, it is all the same...the seasonal festivals that each culture and religion shape for themselves have the same root...the miraculous turning of the seasons, twirling of the earth, that give context and structure to our daily lives.

And, I'm going to institute a new feature of this site that I hope you'll enjoy. So many people ask me for meal and snack inspiration since they know how much I love to share advice, I'm going to do my best to offer daily meal and snack suggestions. They will be seasonal. They will be mostly local. And they will generally be packed with nutrition (sometimes for body, sometimes for soul, usually for both.

We'll start simple today: Spring Deviled Eggs
I found a try at a rummage sale whose original purpose might have been shrimp cocktail or some sort of dippy thing. It works great for a try, so now I have a new staple potluck dish--all we need now is chickens. You probably don't really need a recipe for this, but just in case....

Boil and peel your eggs. Mash up the yolks with a little mayo, mustard, pinch of salt (and spicy paprika if the children don't mind) and fill. I like to use a pastry bag which makes them so easy (no yolk smears on the white) and lovely. If you have trouble mashing the yolks smoothly enough, use the bag without an insert so you still get a clean look and don't have to worry about clogs. I adorned todays eggs with borage flowers; that ethereal blue goes so great with yellow and with the bright green of spring pea soup, but we'll get to that in a few weeks.

I hope you enjoy eating this protein-rich finger food!