Roses of June, you most beautiful

With your sun-pierced hearts

June is named for Juno, the Roman Queen of Heaven, and the sister and wife of the sky god, Jupiter. Juno is a complex figure known as Juno Fortuna, goddess of fate; Juno Moneta, protector of funds; and Juno Caprotina, goddess of erotic love. For all her many aspects she is best known as Juno Pronuba and Juno Lucina, goddess of marriage and childbirth. Because of her patronage of marriage and family, June is a lucky month for marriages. That said, Juno’s quarrels with Jupiter populate the literature of the time. The male poets would have it that Juno was a jealous wife, but another take would be that their quarrels were the power struggle between the matriarchy and the patriarchy. Alas, we all know how that turned out.

June 2 is the feast day of St. Elmo. He was a Syrian bishop martyred by having his intestines drawn from his body with a windlass, so of course, he is the patron saint of gut ailments. Because a windlass was used, he is also the patron of sailors. St. Elmo’s fire is the corona discharge that flickers around a ship’s mast during thunder storms. It is considered good luck to witness the fire, especially if your guts are intact.

June 13 is the feast day of St. Antony of Padua, a biblical scholar and inspired preacher. It was said that a year after his death in 1232, the saint’s tongue was found, red and fresh in the saint’s otherwise desiccated body. The tongue is enshrined in a silver case in Padua where the saint died. He is invoked to find lost things.

St. Anthony, gentle, kind, and near

Help me find what’s lost appear

Guide my steps, my eyes, my way

Bring it back without delay.

It was said that angels danced for St. Vitus when he was imprisoned. His feast day is June 15. He is patron saint of dancers, actors and those suffering from epilepsy.

June 16 is Bloomsday. It celebrates Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s protagonist in his famous novel Ulysses, a 768-page novel about a single day in Bloom’s life. Every year fans of Joyce celebrate this June 16 anniversary. I acknowledge the day knowing that I’ll never read that damn thing again.

June 19 is Juneteenth. Although the Emancipation Proclamation was declared on January 1 1863, it didn’t become settled law in January 1865. There were many southern states that refused to enact the law. Texas was the final holdout until Major General Granger enforced the law on June 19, 1865.

In 1972, Richard Nixon made Father’s Day a national holiday. This year it falls on June 21. To all the good fathers out there—cheers!

June 21^st is also the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Although there’s an abundance of hot summer days to look forward to in the northern hemisphere, Midsummer, as the solstice is sometimes called, marks the waning half of the year. Before climate change bonfires were lit to celebrate the sun and to protect the health of all of us, plant and animal in northern Europe.

June 24 is St. John’s feast day.

Then doth the joyful feast of St. John the Baptist take his turn,

When bonfires great with lofty flame, in every town do burn;

And young men round maids, do dance in every street,

With garlands wrought of Motherwort, or else with Vervain sweet.

–Thomas Kirchmeyer (16 century)

This day honors St. John the Baptist and has been swept into the summer solstice fire celebrations in the northern hemisphere. St. John’s wort is used in many charms and spells of protection, mostly against fairies and devils.

St. John, as the Baptist, is the water bringer in Latin America and his feast day has become a water festival. People pack large picnics and head to the beach for a day of water and sun. Divinations are sometimes made by dropping a raw egg into a tumbler of water, much the same way fortunes are told reading tea leaves. If it rains on his festival, they say that San Juan llora, “Saint John cries.”

June 26 Pied Piper Day

In 1284, the German town of Hamelin was infested with rats, and everything the townspeople did to rid themselves of the vile creatures proved useless. But then, an eccentric stranger came to the town. He was dressed in multi-colored clothing looking like a court jester to the staid town folk and the burghers that ran the town. He assured the local burghers that he could rid them of the rats for a fee, which they readily agreed to. The man took a pipe from his pocket and played a mysterious tune that the rats found irresistible. They followed him into the swift river current and every last one was drowned. It seemed so easy for the Pied Piper that the burghers refused to pay him his fee.

Once again, the piper played a magical tune, this time luring all the children from their homes. They skipped and danced merrily behind the piper as he led them from the town. No parent was able to stop them. It was said a crack opened in the mountain face that closed behind the Pied Piper and all 130 children. The town of Hamelin stages Pied Piper plays every Sunday from June to September.

The story of the Pied Piper appears in children’s books to this day, but it is recorded history that 130 children actually went missing in Hamelin in 1284.

June 29^th is St. Peter’s Day

St. Peter was a fisherman that Jesus Christ chose to head his church when he died. He is the patron saint of fishermen,  celebrated in port towns throughout the Christian world.

The full Strawberry Moon rises on June 29.

From the literal heavens we turn to the literary heavens.

On June 2, 1840 Thomas Hardy was born.  Author of Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy wrote:

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

And: Some folk want their luck buttered.

Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon) shares her June 3 birthday with Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show.)

Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, wrote: A wrier is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Two prize winning authors share a June 7 birthday: Louise Erdrich and Orhan Pamuk.

Patricia Cornwell, prolific mystery author, was born on June 9. Cornwall’s famous detective Kay Scarpetta was inspired by former Virginia Chief Medical Examiner, Marcella Farinelli Fierro.

Cornwall wrote: When I was at college there were two things I vowed I’d never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.

Nobel prize winning author Saul Bellow was born on June 10. He wrote:

You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Yasunari Kawatbata, author of Snow Country and A Thousand Cranes and John Edgar Wideman author of Brothers and Keepers, God’s Gym: Stories, and Fever were both born on June 12. Kawabata wrote: As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16. Her first novel was titled With Shuddering Fall. She has gone on to publish 57 more novels, not to mention short stories, plays and poetry. Her list of literary awards is nearly as long as her list of publications.

Amy Bloom, novelist and short story writer celebrates her birthday on June 18.

Two brilliant writers, Tobias Wolff and Salman Rushdie were born on June 19.

Lillian Hellman, author of The Children’s Hour, Little Foxes and Pentimento was born on June 20. She wrote: Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

John Paul Sartre (No Exit, Being and Nothingness) and Ian McEwan (Amsterdam, Saturday and Atonement) are born on June 21. Sartre wrote: We are our choices, and Freedom is what we do with what has been done to us. McEwan said this about knowledge: No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented or borrowed.

Eric Arthur Blair, whose pen name was George Orwell was born on June 25, 1903. He’s best known for his books Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. He wrote: The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

And: In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

June 27 is the birthday of poet Lucille Clifton and novelist Alice McDermott (Charming Billy and That Night.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was born on June 29. He is most famous for The Little Prince, a story about the young prince of a tiny asteroid who loves and leaves his vain and demanding rose.

I will close with the last verse of Rose, Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, born in 1887, dead thirty years later.

And loop this red rose in that hazel ring

That snares your little ear, for June is short

And we must joy in it and dance and sing,

And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.

Ay! Soon the swallows will be flying south

The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,

Even the roses spilt on youth’s red mouth

Will soon blow down the road all roses go.

O do not tell the priest our plight,

For he would call it sin,

For we’ve been out in the woods all night,

A’ conjuring summer in.

I bring good news by word of mouth,

Good news for cattle and corn,

For now is the sun come out of the South,

With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

—-Rudyard. Kipling

May 1^st May Day is called Beltane by the Celts. The day is halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. If you think of the year as a wheel, then May Day is on the opposite side of the wheel from Halloween. And just as Halloween is a festival of death—the end of harvest, the winter half of the year, May Day is about the time of flowering and fertility—the summer half of the year in the northern hemisphere.  The Celts believed that at Halloween and Beltane the veil between the worlds of “normal” reality and the world of fairies, ghosts and magic was at its thinnest.

May was named for Maia, the goddess of growth and increase. May is a merry month of trysts and secret assignations, but it was considered notoriously unlucky to marry during this month and to wear green (the fairies’ color) was to invite calamity.

Married in May and kirked in green

Both bride and bridegroom won’t long be seen.

The chief symbol of May Day is the May pole. It represents the Green Man, the spirit of vegetation and fertility.

Come lasses and lads, get leave of your dads,

And away to the May pole hie,

For every he has got him a she,

And the fiddler’s standing by.

And Willie shall dance with Jane,

And Johnny his Joan,

To trip it, trip it, trip it, trip it, trip it up and down.

—Traditional song

The May pole is best described by my favorite culture critic Philip Stubbes in his 1583 Anatomy of Abuses: This May pole (this stinking idol rather) is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings from top to bottom, and sometimes painted with variable colours…Then fall they to leap and dance about it at the dedication of their idols, whereof this is the perfect pattern or the thing itself.

Our agrarian lives slowly shifted to industrial beginning in 1760. By 1886 May Day was designated as International Workers’ Day celebrating the working class. The holiday began to commemorate the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, where workers staged a general strike demanding an 8-hour work day. Today the labor class celebrates, marches and protests on May 1.

A different take on May 1, the Buddhists celebrate Versak, the birth, enlightenment and death of the Buddha. Buddhists go to temples, decorate their home altars and celebrate with flowers, lights and paper lanterns.

May 5 is Cinco de Mayo to celebrate Mexico’s victory over the Second French Empire. It celebrates Mexican-American culture with alcohol-fueled partying in the US. The Mexican Independence Day falls on September 16.

Don’t forget it’s Mother’s Day on May 10 this year.

May 12 is the feast day of Saint Pancras, who was martyred in the 4^th century at the tender age of 14. He is the patron saint of children and invoked against headaches (because he was beheaded?) He is the middle saint in a trio of saints whose feast days often herald a late spring frost. They are called the Chilly Saints. He shares this moniker with St. Mamertus (May 11) and St. Servatius (May 13.)

May 12 is also the birthday of Florence Nightingale. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this tribute to her in 1867:

A Lady with a lamp shall stand,

In the great history of the land,

A noble type of good,

Heroic womanhood.

For those who are leery of vaccines, know that on May 14 in 1796, Edward Jenner vaccinated a boy for smallpox using the cowpox germs taken from a milkmaid’s hands. Word spread that those people who were vaccinated turned into cows.

The Belgians celebrate the feast day of Saint Dympna, patron saint of the insane, on May 15. Dympna was an Irish princess who fled her insane, incestuous father to Gheel, a small town just east of Antwerp. Her father found her there and brutally murdered her. The town of Gheel has become a mental hospital without walls. For centuries, relatives and friends have been bringing their mentally ill to her shrine in Gheel. How or why, no one can say, but the afflicted are often healed after visiting her shrine. In 1880, Vincent Van Gogh’s father considered bringing his famous son there for the cure.

On May 27, Muslims celebrate Eid-al-Adha commemorating Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command.

And now for the literary calendar.

t was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it took no brains at all. It merely required no character. Joseph Heller wrote this in his novel, Catch 22. He was born on May 1, 1923.

Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince was born on May 3, 1469. He wrote: The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx share a May 5 birthday. Marx wrote: Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.

Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, wrote: Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

May 12 is Edward Lear’s birthday.

Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee! We think no birds are as happy as we!

Plumpskin, Plashskin, Pelican jill! We think so then, and we think so still!

Daphne du Maurier, author of the fabulous gothic novel, Rebecca, was born on May 13, 1907.

Renowned author Katherine Anne Porter was born on May 15. She is best known for her novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider. In addition to novels, she wrote poetry and short stories.

Omar Khayyam was born on May 18, 1048. This passage is from his famous Rubaiyat:

Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!

One thing at least is certain— This Life flies;

One thing is certain and the rest is Lies—

The Flower that once has blown forever dies…

Nora Ephron, born on May19, began her career as an intern for John F. Kennedy. She is best known as a writer and director of romantic comedies, such as Heartburn, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and Julie and Julia. She won an academy award for writing her original screenplay, When Harry Met Sally.

Born on May 2, 1688, Alexander Pope is the author of The Rape of the Lock. Written as an epic poem, Pope satirizes the English aristocracy.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was born on May 22.

Pulitzer prize winning novelist Michael Chabon celebrates his birthday on May 24. His novels include The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. He shares his birthday with the great Irish writer, William Trevor, best known for The Story of Lucy Gault.

Another auspicious birthday falls on May 25 with the birth of the amazing poet Theodore Roethke, the short story writer and poet Raymond Carver and the Caribbean novelist and short story writer, Jamacia Kincaid.

Dashiell Hammett, pioneer of the noir genre, was born on May 27.

Irish writer Colm Tóibin was born on May 30. He is best known for his novel, Brooklyn.

 Poet Walt Whitman, born on May 31, wrote: Happiness, not in another place, but this place, not in another hour, but this hour.

There are two full moons in May of 2026: The Full Flower Moon which rises on May 1, and the Blue Moon rising on May 31.

Flower Moon—How She Travels

by Mary Oliver

 She moves only by night and on a south wind.

The wild ducks are her envoys.

 Flying ahead,

Scouting the ponds, summoning

 Turtles and dragonflies out of the beds

Of roots and mud.

 he wagon she hauls with her

Is full of new leaves

 Which she sprinkles over the trees as she passes, crying out

The words necessary to birth;

 And small fish

She shakes into ditches and streams;

 And once I saw her

Lift from her wagon the Flower Moon,

 Round and full and milk-white

As a woman’s breast,

 And she kissed it,

She sang to it,

She tossed it high above the trees, then gave

Another to the shining river.

Well-apparel’d April on the heel

Of limping winter treads

–Shakespeare

April comes from the Latin aperire—to open. This time of year the earth has thawed and opens up to seeds once again. April is all about sex and fertility. But first, we’ll take a look at Passover and Easter Week in the Jewish and Christian faiths.

This year Passover begins at sundown on April 1^st in the Hebrew faith. In the Old Testament, Yahweh came to Moses and told him that the Egyptians would be visited by ten plagues unless they released the enslaved Hebrews. The tenth and most devastating plague was death to the firstborn of every human and every animal. To avoid this fate, the Hebrews were instructed to sacrifice a lamb at twilight and mark the gateposts and over the door with blood from the slaughtered lamb to signal the Angel of Death to pass over that household. The following morning, the grief-stricken pharaoh freed all his Hebrew slaves.

April 1^st also falls in Holy Week in the Christian faith. It is called Spy Wednesday, the day that Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus to his enemies for thirty pieces of silver. April 2nd is Maundy Thursday this year. Maundy is Latin for mandatum or commandment. Jesus gathered his disciples to celebrate the Passover, his Last Supper. He told them, I give you a new commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Good Friday falls on April 3^rd. It commemorates Christ’s death on the cross, a solemn and ill-omened day. In British folklore, a kindly woman was said to have offered Jesus a loaf of bread on his way to Calvary, and therefore no bread or buns made on Good Friday will ever go moldy. If baked on Good Friday, hot cross buns protect sailors from drowning and houses from fire. Good Friday is also a good day for planting cool weather vegetables as they will spring from the ground and flourish like Christ rising from the dead. Easter falls on April 5^th this year, the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox. It is the most important and holy day in the liturgical year for Christians. It celebrates Jesus Christ’s triumphant resurrection from the dead.

April 1^st is April Fool’s Day when people play practical jokes on one another. Fools or jesters were well known throughout Europe, China, Persia and the Aztec empire. They served in the courts of kings and wealthy aristocrats or travelled with bands of performers telling stories and jokes, performing magic tricks and juggling. Shakespeare explored the many faces of the fool in his plays. In King Lear, the fool plays the role of truth-teller for the king. When Lear is deposed, the fool is his caretaker. The role of fool in Midsummer Night’s Dream has two faces: Puck, as fairy trickster, whose job is to amuse the fairy king; and Bottom, the simpleton and object of derision for the fairies, the royal court, and Shakespeare’s audience. Falstaff plays the part of fool for his beloved Prince Hal in Henry IV, part 1 and 2. Falstaff has a long list of shortcomings which he cheerfully admits to. He makes a case for living the debauched life, his one virtue is that he truly loves Hal.

Jan Kott in Shakespeare, Our Contemporary writes: The fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances of law, justice, moral order…He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward for good…The fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize the world as rational.

The word fool comes from the Latin follis meaning a pair of bellows or windbag. The Fool introduces the Major Arcana in the tarot deck, inviting the seeker to step into the world of the archetypal. He is the ancestor of the joker, often the wild card in card games.

April’s full moon is called the Pink Moon because many of the quince, cherry, magnolia and redbud trees bloom during the month of April. The Pink Moon rises on April 1^st  this year—no fooling.

A magical Easter Bunny leaves candied eggs and sometimes Easter baskets filled with candy and chocolate bunnies for the children on Easter morning, April 5^th.  I’m not the only parent whose child caught wise about Santa Claus, but was shocked and saddened to hear that his/her parent was the Easter Bunny. The egg is an ancient symbol of creation. The belief that Earth was hatched from an egg is shared with the Celts, Greeks, Hindus, Siberians, Vietnamese, Chinese and Native Americans. Just as a chick emerges from its shell, so Christ emerged from his tomb on Easter morning in the Christian model.

On April 23^rd, we celebrate St. George, the dragon-slayer, patron saint of Great Britain, Ukraine and Ethiopia.

April 24^th is Saint Mark’s Eve. If you want to creep yourself out, go to a church porch at eleven at night and remain there for two hours. During that time phantoms of people who will die in the next year will pass by. If you see your double, it’s time to get your affairs in order.

April 30^th is May Eve signaling the end of the winter half of the year in Northern Europe. It was the time to drive your herds to their summer pasture. Villagers lit huge bonfires. The smoke and ash from these fires had special protective powers. Young people often paired up as they searched the forest for flowers for the May Day festival the following morning. As a result, many children were conceived this night. As with Halloween (the return to the winter half of the year) the veil between the living and the dead, mortals and immortals was at its thinnest.

On that note we turn to famous writers born in April.

Milan Kundera, Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was born on April 1^st, 1929.

On April 2, Giacomo Casanova was born. It’s no surprise that he wrote: Be the flame, not the moth. And I hate death; happy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses, and those who do not love it are unworthy of it.

Poet and civil rights icon Maya Angelou was born on April 4^th.

On April 7^th the great Romantic poet, William Wordsworth was born.

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal Dreams, The Poisonwood Bible, Demon Copperfield and many other fine books celebrates her birthday on April 8^th. She wrote in Animal Dreams,  The very least you can do in life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it under its roof.

Paul Theroux, writer of many travel books and novels, was born on April 10^th, 1941 wrote:  I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

Eudora Welty was born on April 13^th, 1909. She gave this advice to writers: Write what you don’t know about what you know.

Born on April 15,  Henry James is considered the father of the modern novel. His most famous novels are Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl and the novella Turn of the Screw.

Irish J.M. Synge, most famous for his play, Playboy of the Western World, was born on April 16^th. On a beautiful April day, think of Synge’s words: There’s the sound of one of them twittering yellow birds do be coming in the spring-time from beyond the sea, and there be a fine warmth now in the sun, and a sweetness in the air, the way it’ll be a grand thing to be sitting here quiet and easy smelling the things growing up, and budding from the earth.

On April 21^st, 1838, the beloved Charlotte Bronte was born. She wrote about the interior life of women and is most famous for her novel Jane Eyre.

Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 22^nd. He’s most famous for his novels Lolita and Pale Fire. He wrote: A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

April 23, 1564, is the birthday of the god of literature, William Shakespeare. His wit, his verse and his portrayal of human nature is incomparable.

April 28^th  is the birthday of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird

April 30^th is Annie Dillard’s birthday. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading—that is a good life.

I’ll close the month of April with a verse by Shakespeare:

O how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day,

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away.

March

March is named for Mars the god of war. Mars is the father of  the twins, Romulus and Remus, who founded the city of Rome.

Part winter, part spring, the British described March as March many-weathers. The month is especially known for its bluster.  The first three days are dedicated to the Windy Saints on the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd of March:

First comes David
Next comes Chad
Then comes Winnold, roaring mad.

Elia Peattie wrote in The Cup of the Sky that the wind was the oldest voice in the world.

March is also known for coming in like a lion, going out like a lamb. And sometimes the reverse, when the final days of the month are cold and stormy. Those last days of the month are said to be borrowed from April:

March borrowed from April
Three days, and they were ill
The first was snow and sleet
The next was cold and weet
The third was sic a freeze
The Birds’ nebs (beaks) stuck to trees.

Viewed on March 3^rd, this year’s full moon is aptly called the Storm Moon.

March 15^th, the Ides of March, got its ominous reputation from Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Romans called the 15^th of every month the ides, and they were considered benign or sometimes festive the way we think of Wednesday as hump-day. At one time the Romans celebrated their new year on March 15^th, and it was Julius Caesar that changed New Years to January 1^st on his newly designed Julian calendar. Two years later, he was assassinated on March 15^th.

The Irish celebrate the feast day of fifth century St. Patrick on March 17^th.  His emblem is the shamrock which he supposedly used to teach the pagans about the Holy Trinity. The only evidence we have that St Patrick existed is his autobiography, which didn’t surface until 400 years after his death. It’s unlikely that the Irish were converted as early as the fifth century as St. Bernard complained that the Irish were given to “barbarous rites” in the twelfth century. Instead, consider the shamrock god, Trefuilngid Tre-eochair, the son and consort of the Triple Goddess. The pagan shamrock represented the goddess’s—ahem—triple yoni.

St. Joseph’s Day is celebrated on March 19^th. Children born on this day are said to be lucky. A clear St. Joseph’s Day forecasts a fine and fertile year. St. Joseph is the patron saint of carpenters, families and a good death. Husband of the Virgin Mary, Joseph was mocked as “The Divine Cuckold” in plays and paintings during the Middle Ages. People made charms burying his statue on its head or by taking the baby Jesus from him in creches. Renaissance mystics restored respect and admiration to this good man. Many people dedicate the month of March to honor St. Joseph by building altars, baking a special St. Joseph bread and by praying a novena to the saint.

The Spring Equinox (equal day, equal night) falls on March 20^th this year signaling the fruitful half of the year. In ancient times, it celebrated the return of Persephone to her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest. Persephone was abducted by Hades, god of the underworld. Demeter went into mourning, refusing to attend to her earth mother duties. Flowers withered, fruit died on the vine, and soon everyone was starving. At that point Zeus demanded that Hades return the girl. There was a hitch as there typically is. Because Persephone had eaten 6 pomegranate seeds during her stay with Hades, she had to return to the underworld and rein as Hades’ queen one month for each seed she consumed. Then Demeter resumes her mourning. Leaves fall off the trees, the fruit falls to the ground and the days grow cold until Persephone’s return.

My list of famous writers born in March begins with Dr. Seuss, Tom Wolfe and John Irving, all born on March 2nd. This from Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meanie:  Your memory is a monster: you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you.

The Nobel prize writer, Gabriel García Márquez said this about memory: …always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by can never be recovered, and the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. Márquez shares his March 6^th birthday with Louisa May Alcott and Ring Lardner.

The wonderful non-fiction writer, John McPhee, shares his March 8^th birthday with Jeffrey Eugenides.

Born on March 19^th, the brilliant Russian satirist, Nikolai Gogol, wrote short stories, novels and plays.  Famous for The Overcoat and The Nose, Gogol’s masterwork Lost Souls led to his premature death. He saw the book as the Russian version of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first book, Lost Souls, represented Dante’s Inferno. For the next ten years, Gogol worked on the second of The Divine Comedy trio, Purgatory. He descended into madness and starved himself to death at age 42.

Born on March 20^th, 44BCE, Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses is one of our primary sources of classical mythology. Once the darling of Roman society, the Emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomes, in what is now Romania. When asked why he fell from grace, Ovid said it was due to a poem and a mistake. Scholars are still puzzling over what he meant.

Nobel prize author Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, wrote this: Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters,  it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. He was born on March 28th.

Emily Dickenson was a great fan of the month of March:

Dear March, come in!
How glad I am!
I looked for you before.
Put down your hat—
You must have walked
How out of breath you are!
Dear March, how are you?
And the rest?
Did you leave Nature well?
Oh, March, come right upstairs with me,
I have so much to tell!

August

There came three men from out of the West,
Their fortune for to try
As they had sworn a solemn oath,
John Barleycorn should die
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head.
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn was dead.

Then they let him lie for a very long time
Till the rain from heaven did fall. Then little John sprung up his head,
And soon amazed them all.
They let him stand till midsummer
Till he looked both pale and wan,
And little Sir John he growed a long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee
They rolled him and tied him by the waist,
and served him barbarously…

This year’s full moon is on August 9th and is called the Corn Moon.

August begins with a festival called Lammas or Lughnasah to celebrate the Celtic sun god, Lugh. His spirit inhabits the growing grain. Once the grain is harvested, it gives life to humankind and their animals. The festival celebrates once more the pattern of death and resurrection.

Lammas is a cross-quarter day, falling halfway between the summer solstice and the fall equinox. It is the first of the harvest festivals. In Great Britain, the first grains of the season were baked in a loaf and brought to church for a special blessing, called “loaf mass.” Every member of the household was to take a bite of the blessed bread for good luck, health and prosperity in the coming year.

The Hindus celebrate the god Ganesha during the month of August. He was said to have been created by the goddess, Parvati. With his beautiful face and several arms, he looked like every other Hindu god. Unfortunately, he crossed the great god, Shiva, who decapitated him. Parvati was so furious with Shiva, she barred him from her bed chamber. He relented and promised her that he would restore Ganesha’s head with the head of the next animal who happened by. And that’s how Ganesha became the elephant-headed god. He’s the god of new beginnings, of arts and letters, and of good fortune. Make an altar for him and offer him a bowl of sweets or red flowers. His prayer is: Om Shri Ganeshaya Namah.

St. Bartholomew’s feast day falls on August 24th. He died by being skinned alive. He’s the patron saint of butchers, leatherworkers and bookbinders.

If Bartlemas Day be fine and clear
You may hope for a prosperous Autumn that year.

All the tears St Swithin can cry
St. Barthelmy’s mantle can wipe dry.
—If that makes no sense to you, see my almanac for July.

John the Baptist was beheaded at the request of King Herod’s niece, Salome, after she danced for him at his birthday feast. This leads us to Philip Stubbes, a culture critic of 16th century England in his The Anatomy of Abuses, 1573:

All mixed, effeminate, lascivious, amorous dancing is utterly unlawful to Christians, to chaste and sober persons. For if Herod with but seeing Salome dance was so inflamed by her love, that he promised to give her whatsoever she desired…what would he have promised, had he danced with her? And I have heard many impudently say, that they have chosen their Wives, and Wives their Husbands, by dancing. Which plainly proves the Wickedness of it.

With that admonishment we turn to writing—

Born August 1, 1819, Herman Melville, wrote: I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.—from his famous Moby Dick.

The renowned writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin was born on August 2nd 1924. He wrote: The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. He shares his birthday with novelist Isabel Allendale. She’s written many charming books, but her best and most memorable is House of Spirits.

Guy de Maupassant, considered the 19th century master of the short story, was born on August 5th, 1850—Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Winner of the Golden Booker for In a Free State, V.S. Naipaul was born on August 17th, 1932.

Celebrated wit Ogden Nash was born on August 19th, 1902. He wrote: You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

H.P. Lovecraft was born on August 20th, 1890. His philosophy that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger intergalactic existence… informed his speculative fiction.

Beloved storyteller, Ray Bradbury was born on August 22nd, 1920. Best known for Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and The Illustrated Man, once said: If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

Theodore Dreiser, born on August 27th, 1871 once wrote: The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions – none more so than the most capable. He’s best known for Sister Carrie.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, scientist, playwright, novelist, poet and philosopher, was born on August 28th, 1749. He wrote Faust, Part One and Two.

One of the greatest and most influential writer of all time, Leo Tolstoy, was also born on August 28, seventy-nine years after Goethe. His most famous novels are War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but he wrote many other novels and novellas and 56 short stories.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30th, 1797. Her mother was a philosopher and well-known advocate for women’s rights. Mary is most known for her iconic novel, Frankenstein, and her marriage to poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Kurt Vonnegut said this of the writer William Saroyan: …the first and still the greatest of all American minimalists. Saroyan was born on August 31st, 1908.

Hot July brings cooling showers
Apricots and gillyflowers

In the Gaelic tradition, July is called the yellow month. The full moon on July 10th is called the Hay Moon.
For most of us in North America, the hot and humid Dog Days extend from July 3rd all the way to August 11th. They were named for the dawn rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in our heavens, after our sun. Sirius stems from the Greek “seirios,” which means “scorching.” The ancient Romans and Greeks believed that it was the combined heat of Sirius and the sun that produced the sweltering weather causing times of drought, violence and bad luck. In these days of climate change, it’s prime season for wildfire, which has burned thousands of acres of forest in the last decade.

Carving of the ancient Egyptian warrior goddess Sekhmet. This carving is on the wall of the Temple of Kom Ombo, which dates from the Ptolemaic period of Ancient Egypt.

Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of ancient Egypt, roamed the earth during the hot days of July. Her breath was the hot desert wind, bringing plague. One story tells about the time Sekhmet was sent to earth by her father, Ra, the sun god, to destroy the mortals who had not offered him sufficient sacrifice. Once the slaughter started, Sekhmet was filled with bloodlust and killed men, women and children, nearly annihilating the population. She was so fierce and bloodthirsty that the gods were afraid she would kill all of humanity.

Her father joined the other gods and poured out a lake of beer and dyed it with red ochre. Mistaking it for blood, Sekhmet drank and drank until she was far too drunk to continue killing. She returned quietly to Ra and the rest of humanity was saved.

As we move to a different pantheon, July 15th is the feast day of St. Swithin’s. According to British weather lore, if it rains on the 15th, we’ll enjoy forty days of wet weather.

St. Swithin’s Day, if thou dost rain
Full forty days it will remain.
St. Swithin’s Day, if thou be fair
For forty days, twill rain no mair.

St. Swithin was a 9th Century champion of the poor and a beloved bishop of Winchester. On his deathbed, he requested that his body be buried in the common churchyard beneath the feet of the passers-by and rain from the eaves. His grave was the site for so many miracles that the monks of Winchester exhumed his remains and buried them in a crypt within the cathedral. The saint was unhappy at the change of resting place. He wept for forty days and forty nights. The sodden monks returned St. Swithin to his former grave.

July 20th celebrates one of my favorites, the 14th Century St. Wilgefortis, or St. Uncumber as she is known by her followers. Her father promised her in marriage to the king of Sicily, and no amount of pleading would change his mind. The night before the wedding, Wilgefortis prayed to grow so ugly that the king would reject her. The next morning, she had grown a luxuriant mustache and beard. Her father was so furious he crucified her on the spot.

Wilgefortis promised her mourners that anyone who prayed to her would be free of the encumbrance of men. On July 20th, a woman unhappy in marriage can bring oats to her shrine to feed the horse that will carry her husband away.

In the literary firmament, we have William Strunk Jr., born on July 1, and author of the famous Elements of Style:
Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause…
The situation is perilous, but there is still one chance of escape.
Franz Kafka, whose novels and stories blended realism with a disturbing dreamscape. He’s best known for The Metamorphosis. He was born on July 3rd and died at age 40 from tuberculosis.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on Independence Day, most known by school children for The Scarlett Letter.
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, was born on July 7th.
Both born on July 10th, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Marcel Proust did not.
Born on July 11th, EB White is best known for Charlotte’s Web, and Jhumpa Lahiri for Interpreter of Maladies.
The brilliant poet, Pablo Neruda shares his July 12th birthday with Henry David Thoreau, whose retreat from the world at Walden Pond was a half-mile from the road to town. His mother often brought him food.
Iconoclast Hunter S Thompson was born on July 18th.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21st. His minimalist style changed the way we write prose.
But then there’s the florid, hilarious prose of Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, who was born on July 22nd and died this year at the ripe age of 92.
My hero, Raymond Chandler, was born on July 23rd. This is from his novel, Red Wind:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

We close on July 30th, the birthday of Emily Bronte, author of the haunting novel Wuthering Heights.

A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune
—Coleridge

Welcome June!

June is the most beautiful month of the year in Portland. All the trees are leafed out, the dogwoods are still in bloom, as are the peonies, lilies, roses, black-eyed Susans, daisies, fuchsias, foxglove, and lavender. The night-blooming jasmine perfumes the air. Truly, the list of flowers is endless, and everything is new and bright and saturated with color.

June was named for the Roman goddess Juno. Juno was the patron of marriage, hearth and home, which is where the custom of June weddings originated. The full moon is called the Strawberry Moon, to honor the first fruit of the season.

The summer Solstice falls on June 21^st. It’s the longest day of the year and officially the beginning of summer. During a typical Portland winter, we can go for weeks without seeing the sun. Now that it’s June, the skies are violet-blue and the daylight lasts for nearly 17 hours.

My birthday falls in June. I do love birthdays. I adore birthday cake and birthday wishes. I love getting new books from friends and family on my birthday. Getting a nice stack in June can last me nearly until December’s Christmas books.