"What potent blood hath modest May
What fiery force the earth renews"

Beltane, like Samhain, is a time of "no time" when the veils between the two worlds are at their thinnest. No time is when the two worlds intermingle and unite and the magic abounds! It is the time when the Faeries return from their winter respite, carefree and full of faery mischief and faery delight. ... When the veils are so thin it is an extremely magical time, it is said that the Queen of the Faeries rides out on her white horse. Roving about on Beltane eve She will try to entice people away to the Faeryland. Legend has it that if you sit beneath a tree on Beltane night, you may see the Faery Queen or hear the sound of Her horse's bells as She rides through the night. Legend says if you hide your face, She will pass you by but if you look at Her, She may choose you. (Witchvox)

When we moved into our apartment in May of 2004, I was very excited about having the yardlet out back, a tiny plot of our own, as wide as our unit and about eight feet from the building to the back fence. I had grand visions of flowerbeds and herb patches and sitting outside to enjoy the green space. It was short-cropped grass when we moved in, a blank slate, full of potential, but I still had a month and a half of school, a wedding to plan, and a job that called for four weeks of summer day camp. By the time I thought about the yardlet again, it was because rabidmonkey gave me a miniature rose bush and J-Dog gave me three little potted herbs as housewarming gifts. When I went out to plant them, I discovered that the yardlet was beginning to give up some of its secrets. I was delighted to discover four other miniature rosebushes, growing bravely back from where they'd been mowed to the ground.

Before the end of summer, a fence-high row of hibiscus had grown up along one side of the yard. A huge tangle of honeysuckle covered the corner where another fence divides our yardlet from the yardlet to the south of us. I was poking around out there one day and found about two dozen bricks, half-buried in the earth along the fence. I dug them all out and used them to build small half-circles around the rose bushes. I felt like I'd discovered a secret garden of my own, once loved by someone and then left to go wild.

A few days later, I came home from work and threw open the curtains and nearly burst into tears. The honeysuckle was gone. The grass was cut short again, and so were J-Dog's herbs. All the bricks I'd dug out and arranged were gone. I was furious, but there was really nothing I could do. I hadn't had a chance to mulch the planting beds, so the yard men had assumed everything was a weed. The only thing they spared (thankfully) were the roses. Eventually I went back out and salvaged a few more bricks from along the fence, but the sadness remained.

The next summer, the roses struggled mightily on, but the honeysuckle and the hibiscus were gone. Last summer, to my surprise, the hibiscus sprang up in one of the rose beds, about five feet away from its original patch. I mulched carefully last summer, and three of the four rosebushes survived another year. This evening I went out again, armed with a giant bag of cedar mulch. The yard men mowed today while we were at work, but luckily they left the bricks and the weed-choked rosebush beds alone. Weeding the tiny patches, I once again felt the promise and possibility of a garden. We'll probably never establish one here, since the yard maintenance is so unpredictable and we don't even have an outdoor spigot, but I'm trying hard to keep the roses alive until we move into a house of our own. I plan to dig them up and take them with us, because as romantic as it was for me to find them, I don't trust that the next tenant will care as much. Besides, I'm sort of hoping they'll bring some of their magic with them.



(If only I'd found this article last night instead of tonight:  "On May Eve, bless your garden in the old way by making love with your lover in it." Secret garden, indeed.)



Reading:  Trickster's Queen by Tamora Pierce

Playing:  Because of the Times by Kings of Leon

Watching:  Firefly. It's just as awesome the third time around.