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Shenandoah Spring

Used by Permission

The calendar turns to May and with it come reveries of other spring times when Mom would clip bouquets of roses, iris, and greenery to decorate the graves of loved ones at Grove Hill Cemetery.  The first day of May was also the safe day to begin planting the garden free of frost.    And in Kentucky where I grew up, the first Saturday in May was thrilling because the world’s fastest horses competed in the Kentucky Derby.  Nostalgia reigned because as the horses were walking to the starting gate, all the world was focused on Churchill Downs, just thirty miles from where I lived the first eighteen years of my life. (Alas, I was never to actually see the Derby.) But when the orchestra played Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home the refrain would haunt me down the years with wistful longing no matter where I might be on the planet.

Back then, only one month of school left for the year was uppermost in the minds of all the kids.  As the decades have passed, the month of May and the ending words of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia have since lingered in my thoughts: "There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are — as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands — dead. The term is over; the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning."....And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. . . . And we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before."    [from the final paragraphs of The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis]

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                        

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

                                  William Wordsworth

    Alpine Spring

 For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that Day.    St. Paul to Timothy 112