The ale was fun. We left really early and ate bagels and things in the car while we drove up to Shepherdstown, which is just across the border of West Virginia. It wasn't real mountain country, though, which was good because I don't like that part of WV. Mountains are all well and good from a few miles away, but I don't like it when there's nothing you can see that's horizontal and it looks like it would only take one good rainstorm to send all the buildings in the area toppling down into the river.

Anyway, we drove up and the town was really nifty. The main street was lined with coffee shops and health food stores and shops with names like "The Herb Lady" and "Sky's the Limit." We danced a stand, mostly with the aid of a CD player and the Letchworth Morris Men, who made the recording. Then there was a May Day parade. We went up to the Episcopal church on the corner and stood around for a long time waiting for noon. There were four teams and a rather bedraggled hobbyhorse and a lot of people in quasi-medieval clothes and even a Green Man. He was wearing all green and a poncho with felt leaves sewn onto it and a big helmet sort of thing made of chicken wire with lots of leaves and lilac wired to it. On top of it all was a pair of deer antlers, which gave just the right impression of benevolance mixed with danger. He went around tapping every woman there on the shoulder and saying "May you bear twin sons." Beth hypothesized that he wanted to even out the gender of the people there, as most of us were women. The hobbyhorse seemed to be a big cardboard circle with a plastic tablecloth on it and a cloth horse head sticking out of the center. You could see the man underneath it and the head wasn't very convincing. The Albemarle one is way better.

Most of the dancers on the Shepherdstown team were women and a lot of them had small children in arms or strollers. Part of the parade was a lot of little girls wearing dresses and wreaths of flowers bearing a sign that said "Morris Minors". Apparantly they were all the daughters of the dancers, though I suspect they borrowed all the local girls they could find because there were so many of them. Lilacs were everywhere - on the top of the May pole, in the dancer's hair, in the little girls' wreaths, twined around a big hand drum, in the Green Man's hat, in the mane of the blue-eyed unicorn that we think used to belong to Baltimorris. There were poppies growing in the yard next to the church, and they struck me as important. Poppies were considered Demeter's flower in Greece. May Day is a very Demeter holiday.

Finally noon came, proving once again that Morris and parades don't mix. The music was much too fast for dancing to, so we ended up sort of skipping down the street waving our hanks at random intervals. Well, not always random, but mostly. We danced down the main street past the town hall and down to a park. There people set up the May pole and we all sat down in a circle. Apparently two of the people in medieval dress were getting married, so there was that, too. Two old women in white dresses came into the middle of the circle and danced to the music of a flute. Then the Morris Minors danced and everyone said they were very pretty and very good. There was a rather strange mummer's play (stranger than usual, I mean) and some clogging. The green man came out and danced a bit. Then there was some Morris dancing and Dad went the wrong way and Mom ended up hitting him with her stick by mistake and somehow everybody except me ended up on one side of the set. It was very confusing. But I got the feeling people weren't paying us much attention anyway, so it didn't matter quite so much. Then a man played trombone while a woman danced. She was as tall and stately as a goddess and danced all around the May pole and around the bridal couple and it was pretty strange but sort of beautiful, too. I took off my shoes and the grass and the wind felt so good. A girl came around with a plate of poppyseed cake for everyone. Poppies again.

Finally the couple got married. They kissed twice before they had even got to the man and wife part, and the man's tennis shoes kind of spoiled the effect of his costume, but it was still a fairly good wedding. Afterward we all got to wind the May pole, which was the best part. It got very confused but May poles aren't supposed to be perfect and it came out all right in the end. The musicians played Mairi's Wedding, which I thought was appropriate. The funny thing was that last week's Sound and Spirit was about weddings and Ellen played that song. I love May poles.

After the winding, the medeival people left and the musicians started playing. A lot of people had drums, but a lot of other people started jamming with whatever was handy. People were playing ice cream tubs and vases and Morris bells and all sorts of things. After that died out we all went up to this monument at the end of the part to have lunch. Somebody forgot to bring bread so we all ate lettuce and tomatoes and roast beef until somebody brought a few loaves up. We all ate and told stories and stuff and miraculously I didn't cut my feet on any of the broken glass that was lying around. There were lilacs and baby's breath growing wild all over the part, so a lot of us got flowers to stick in our vests or hair or whatever. There was leftover wedding cake, too.

Aferwards we all went up to a place called the Moravian Inn and danced a last stand there. We were under a magnolia tree and there were fuzzy little seed pod things scattered around on the grass. They were very soft and somehow reminded me of deer. I don't know why, since I've never felt a deer. After that there was a pub stop, but Mom and Allison and Patricia and Beth and I all went to the shops instead. I swear I could live in Sky's the Limit. It sold all sorts of jewelry sorted by the kind of stone it was made with and beautiful embroidered dresses and skirts and things and little meditation bells and incense and candles and things. Allison got a ring and I ended up getting an incense burner because all the dresses were too expensive. I also went across the street to Maggie's Grocery and got some new incense. My favorite kind is coconut. I burned a little of the rose scented kind last night, though it doesn't smell much like roses. It smells more like smoke.

I had this really neat dream Friday night - I don't remember most of it, but at the end I was looking at my bookshelf and on it was set a lot of little figurines. It was a cross between a creche and one of those Dickens villages you see at Christmas. I don't remember there being any manger or anything, but there were a lot of villagers standing around. There was an old man with a lantern and lots of other people, but there was one on the right that caught my attention. It was me. She was wearing a brown burlap skirt and had a cloth pulled over her head, but the figure was unmistakably meant to be me. I remember touching her, feeling her yellow clay hair streaming out behind her, her skirt held in her smooth clay hand as she ran. When I woke up all I could think was that I wanted to make one of those. It was like that song that Noel Sing We Clear does - "Shepherds and lasses come leaping and dancing, leaping and dancing the eve of Noel." I want to make a creche like the Italian one my grandmother has, with the goose girl and the violinist and the washerwoman and all the others. But this one would have people from my life as well - me, my family, Christine, Caelia, Bridget - all at different times. It's like that comic strip Jump Start where the children age, but not in the ususal way. Instead of drawing them a little older every day, the author has a "baby Sunny", "toddler Sunny", "preschool Sunny", etc, pop up every now and then. Every Sometimes "adult Sunny" will show up to give advice or something. It would be sort of like that - me at 15, me at 22, my parents in seven years, and so on. Every year I could add a few more people. I always loved manger scenes and we've got about seven in the attic, made of pipe cleaners and clay and cloth or whatever my favorite medium was at the time. It had never occured to me to use people I knew in one, which is why I'm so glad I had this dream. For Christine's figure I can use scraps from the blue cloak and red scarf I made her. Oh, this is going to be so much fun! Mom was going to go and get clay this afternoon, but somehow that didn't happen and I'll have to wait another week to start, but these things do happen.

May 4
May 9