June 1, 2021

May/June

May and June are my favourite months. They’re so much my favourite months that I like April even better for the sole reason that in April, we still have all of May and June before us. May and June encompassing what I like to think of as “Kerry Season,” from Mother’s Day until my birthday a month and a half later, and in between those two auspicious dates, both my daughters have their birthdays, we celebrate our wedding anniversary, and there’s that EPIC FESTIVAL known as Father’s Day, which is like Mother’s Day, but smaller. (Both my mother and my mother-in-law also celebrate their birthdays in June. So did Barbara Pym. How could 30 days contain such wonder?)

We are lucky in our household that anybody’s special day is everybody’s special day—we all get takeout and cake. We’ve been especially lucky this year in Toronto that the weather has been glorious and all the most incredible flowers are in bloom. May and June is the season of having so much to look forward to, even before we roll into summer proper. May/June is the season where sometimes we get tired of cake. May/June is before we start visiting places infested with bugs and before I start getting covered in rashes. Before everything is covered in sand, and beach days are just a delicious fantasy. But it’s not too soon for too much ice cream.

May and June are one of those rare experiences that I love and don’t encounter enough, which manage to be wondrous in themselves, but also on the cusp of everything. May and June are like the most wonderful swan dive off a cliff, gorgeous, in slow motion, and at the end of it all is the clearest, bluest lake you’ve ever seen. SUMMER.