by Michelle Y. Souliere
Happy spring everyone! It's easy to be distracted when you're doing historic research. A researcher will spend hours, weeks, months, even years, looking at history over a span of decades and centuries, focusing on specific locales within the state, or the trail left by families and businesses which cut a wide swathe through Maine history.
It is important to pull one’s head out of the sinkhole (or rabbit hole) that it’s been stuck in, and remind oneself that the Maine of today is being created around you, as is the rest of the world. And Maine, being seasonal in its heart of hearts, has regular cues to signal us that time is shifting and cycling around us constantly.
May Day has cues that I remember being introduced to at a young age. If you ask my father, he will tell you about my early efforts to pronounce “forsythia,” as their yellow firework flowers were notably the first to burst against the dull spring bracken, each a tiny ray of sunshine in sequence.
By the time I was in grade school, I was in the thick of reading Louisa May Alcott’s books, including Jack and Jill (1880), which painted a very pretty picture of the practice of hanging May baskets, or going a-Maying, in the environs of Alcott’s home in Concord, Massachusetts.
A kinder version of Ding Dong Ditch, the practice involved crafting paper baskets full of wildflowers, and if meant very personally (although anonymous by nature), the basket would also include a snippet of homemade poetry meant for the recipient.
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| illus from Chicken Little Jane by H.S. Barbour [1920] |
This tradition was well-known in Maine too, and on May 8th, 1880, around the time of Alcott’s book publication, the Lewiston Evening Journal announced in its “Maine News and Gossip” column that May-basket-on-the-brain was the “latest contagion” to infect Androscoggin County.
The celebration of May was certainly not new. Tracking back a few decades to May Eve 1950, we find the editor of the Bangor Daily Whig & Courier, John S. Sayward, applauding local interest in the May Day celebration. He knew some folks scoffed at the practice of May baskets because of its superstition-related origins, but countered, “these kindly and innocent superstitions may be regarded as dilutants of essential and beautiful truths which might not else be perceived or generally diffused, or sufficiently remembered or suitably regarded.”
Sayward saw the practice as a vital way to refresh the community’s sense of humanity and heart, in the wake of the First Industrial Revolution: “in the anxious and earnest and often heartless strivings for power and pelf* in our world, the lamp of the affections is in danger of extinguishment and all the social sympathies of the heart of being dried up.”
*: pelf -- (a)Stolen goods, booty, spoil; forfeited property; also, the goods of a conquered people; (b) property, goods, riches, an object of value. In use between 1200s to about 1500, decreasing in usage thereafter, from old French root pelfre. [source: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED32776 ]
The superstitious aspects referred to included folk customs for fortune-telling, as well as earlier traditions like the May Pole, the crowning of the May Queen, and Beltane, the Gaelic celebration of summer’s beginning each year. All of these practices were dismissed as having pagan and unenlightened roots, but Sayward urged neighbors to take another look, and see instead the ties to community.
This is not to say that May Day in Maine is always rosy. Imagine the odds of that! In 1867, the Ellsworth American correspondent from Gouldsboro noted the tendency of so-called “smiling May” to play coquette, and switch to a frown as she “dashed cold water on the scheme and probably all her nice little flowers remained in their beds, for fear of taking cold should they venture out.” Those of us who live here year-round allow her these moods, because the eventual rewards are worth it. Besides, it’s always good to prepare for the worst, yet hope for the best. Spring is coming!
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| from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The May Queen” illus by Eleanor Vere Boyle [1861] |
And if we glance back to Sayward’s advice, maybe we should remember that spring warmth can just as easily supplied by our hearts. In 1871, readers of the Lewiston Evening Journal learned of a large group of young men who loaded up a half-bushel May basket, cowing its petite competitors, “filling it with Shakespeare’s works, and other things useful, and left it on the steps of one of their chums, Fred Storah, who has been sick for more than a year. After giving the door-bell a number of whirls, they lay concealed to see the result. The door opened, the basket was carried in, and through an opening in the curtains a smiling face was seen, its owner, no doubt, thinking that he still had some friends who are thoughtful of him.”
With May Day also comes the crowing of the May Queen. While today local practice may have few adherents outside of religious contexts (Catholic, for one), anyone who has dreamed their moments away to the lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” understands how marvelous it is that any mere mortal can be enchanted by this “spring clean” for the May Queen. It’s time to reassess, renew, rethink, replant, and revive, for all of us. We have made it through the winter!
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| illus: Randolph Caldecott’s “Garlands of the May Queen” [1884] |
Members of the Maine Pagan community and happy joiners would flock to the site on Popham Beach each year, creating a legendarily wonderful way to celebrate the end of cabin fever and embrace the better weather to come. I remember first hearing about it at a Maine Pagans panel discussion at USM here in Portland. However, the terrible coastal storms of January 2024 took a toll on Popham Beach, and the celebration has been moved south to Cape Elizabeth. As of 2027 it is still being held at Crescent Beach.
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| illus: The May-Pole Dance illus by Adelia Belle Beard [1887] |
https://beltaneonthebeach.org/
Happy May everyone!
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