In a Word . . . June

Love this time of year. I do. Those two words also. So prevalent these weeks at weddings. Though, in my part of the world, very many weddings now take place between Christmas and New Year's Day when everyone is home from Australia and elsewhere.

Can be a bit mad, though. As in my nephew Declan. Home from Sydney for Christmas 2014, he had to attend three weddings and two stag parties between Christmas Day and New Year's Day 2015.

He did too. Such was his commitment to laying down his holiday for his friends (it’s a family thing!). When the time came he had to be poured on to the long haul back to Sydney.

I love this time of the year because everything is so fresh. Some people too. Summer is in its youth and, even if it may be no great shakes, trees still blossom, flowers still bloom, and the hills are alive with the sound of young life.

Another reason I have such reservations about Patrick Pearse is how he looked on all this beauty. It made him sad, he said. And people wonder whether he had a death wish?

Here is what he wrote in The Wayfarer: "The beauty of the world hath made me sad,/This beauty that will pass . . . Will pass and change, will die and be no more,/ Things bright and green, things young and happy."

Classic glass half full stuff. Old misery himself. He forgot to remind readers that at this time of the year every year the world is again young and beautiful. That mountainsides are aflame with the yellow furze – or whins as we call them in the West – the cherry blossom is shedding pink snow and the whitethorn fills the air with its sweet seductive fragrance.

And, of course, that’s what it is all about, seduction. Just plain sex, by another name. Not that there is anything plain about such sexy trees and flowers in June.

No doubt finding the carnal averse to his ascetic sensibility, Pearse missed all that in favour of the dour “. . . will die and be no more”. But, unlike his thinking, life is not linear. It is cyclical and repeats its things of beauty every June.

June from Old English iunius, itself from Latin junius, probably derives from Juno the Roman goddess, protector of women and marriage.

[ inaword@irishtimes.com ]