Haiku for May

Extra popcorn saved
in a pile by the bowl.
Still more spring to come.

Okay, this one deserves some explanation.

I am a person who doesn’t deal well with limited amounts of things—time, candy bars, popcorn. I always want an assurance that there’s something more after, something else to look forward to, something to anticipate. And it’s one thing to say that, but this is really best illustrated through a personal story:

When I was a kid, my mom would pop us big bowls of popcorn, which my siblings and I would descend upon like a pack of ravenous crows discovering a field of fall’s bounty, racing to see who could eat the most of it before anyone else could get in a bite. That is to say, it never really lasted all that long. And if you’ve ever participated in a childhood-induced, sibling-fueled snacking frenzy that lasts all of ten minutes at maximum, you’ll know two things to be true:

1. There’s never as much popcorn as you want there to be, and
2. When you get to the bottom of the bowl, you run out of good popcorn to eat before you run out of popcorn. This is because all the gross, half-popped, crunchy kernels sift through the glorious fluffy ones to the bottom (on account of them being smaller and more dense), so you end up with a couple of disappointing handfuls at the end that you nevertheless eat because you’re not ready to be done.

This, of course, would Simply Not Do for me. So I, being the oldest and therefore the smartest, devised a sneaky and devious plan to make sure I would survive past the inevitable emptiness of the bowl—I’d steal handfuls out when people weren’t paying close attention so that I could save myself a pile of Good and Fluffy popcorn to eat after everything from the bowl was gone.

This, of course, didn’t go unnoticed for long. When my siblings inevitably picked up on my strategy and tried it themselves I would get irritated; when my siblings noticed me doing it they would get irritated; and on a couple of occasions my mom had to intervene and tell whoever was doing it (thereby amassing a large pile of Off-Limits Popcorn for themselves) that they had to stop because it wasn’t fair to everyone. We stopped for a while, sort of. And then we got a little older and a little more mature and I started doing it again on occasion. I still do it to this day when I go home. There are some things you just don’t outgrow.

So anyhow, what in the world does squabbling over popcorn have to do with May?

Well, the answer to that is all the reasons that May is, for the most part, my favorite month. I am a summer girl (hello seasonal affective disorder and being perpetually cold all the time), and May is perfectly situated to be my happy month. It’s the time of year when the weather is getting to be consistently warm (usually). It’s the closest month to the solstice that doesn’t actually contain the solstice, which means every day the sun is up a little longer than the last. And, spring doesn’t come until June, so that means I have the whole rest of the spring ahead of me and then the entire summer, with peaches and pools and birthdays and blue skies. May is one long, extended day of anticipation—the worst months of the year are over and I get to look forward to summer and fall and then, at the end, the holidays. Everything good is ahead of me, the same way I still have my own little pile of popcorn to eat once we finish with the bowl.

Happy May, everybody. I wish you the most of longer days and sunshine until 8:30pm and the entire, glorious summer stretching out in front of you.

—Kira

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