FanPost

OT--May 9th, Merry Month of May ed.


or as some refer to it ... the Lusty Month of May

in theory, May brings the flowers occasioned by all the rains of April.

Many, many flowers... one of those flowers is the tiny mayflower, the State Flower of Massachusetts.

Not to be confused with the other Mayflower, of course; the one bringing those pilgrims to what was to become America. It was a 180 ton three-masted merchant vessel, originally in the wine-trade, then chartered by the Separatist Puritan pilgrims ("splinter!")

During the first winter more than half of the settlers died as a result of poor nutrition and inadequate housing. Squanto, a local Indian, taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn and where to fish and trap beaver, and Plymouth became a colony of subsistence farming on small private holdings. Fortunately, thanks to Squanto and the other Patuxet, the Plymouth colony never descended into cannibalism, as has now been reported about Jamestown.