May Cannot Be Trusted

April is a mean girl and May pretends to be her sweet older sister.

MAY CANNOT BE TRUSTED

May 7, 2026

Stockholm, WI

This morning I broke an egg in my hat.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

I had too many eggs to fit in my coat pockets, which is how I used to carry them until the winter I slipped on the ice and broke nearly a dozen eggs inside my jacket. If you have never cleaned raw egg out of a winter coat while standing in a barn aisle in twenty-degree weather, count your blessings.

So now I carry eggs in whatever hat I happen to be wearing, usually my trusty Carhartt knit cap.

This usually works pretty well. Unless you set the hat down full of eggs in the sheep stall while trying to photograph an elderly goose and then grab the hat too fast and accidentally break one.

The hat wasn’t dirty until then.

But when I picked it back up, it was full of wood shavings, hay, manure, and now broken egg, so it needed a good washing anyway.

This has been the longest winter.

It is May in Wisconsin and I wore gloves to chores again this morning because the wind still feels bitter enough that I think it has something against me.

The sky has been gray for days.

It’s still too cold to plant tomatoes. I know better than to complain, though because anyone who gardens in Wisconsin knows that April is a mean girl and May pretends to be her sweet older sister.

But I am telling you right now, May cannot be trusted.

She pretends to love you with a sunny seventy-five degree day and then turns around and slaps you with a freeze warning text on your phone.

Still, I was hoping.

The horses, meanwhile, are furious. All they want in life right now is the lush green grass on the other side of the fence, which unfortunately could literally kill them. Morgan horses are easy keepers. Unfortunately, they do not know when to stop eating spring grass any more than I know when to stop eating caramel M&M’s. So, they stand in the paddocks eating hay and glaring at me as though I personally canceled spring.

The chickens are no better.

One of the Buff Orpington hens has gone broody and attacks my hand every time I try to collect eggs from the nesting box. Her name is Ruth. All the tan hens are named Ruth. The only way to retrieve the eggs without losing blood is to hold a plastic dog dish gently over her head while reaching underneath her. She pecks furiously at the dish the entire time like she is defending classified government documents.

Then there is the goose

.

She is ancient now. Twelve or thirteen years old at least. Every spring she builds a nest and sits faithfully on eggs that are never going to hatch.

I know that.
She does not.

But she wants them. She sits there with that fierce dinosaur face daring anyone to come near her imaginary children, and so I let her keep them until she gives up in a month or so.

Even the sheep wander around in their heavy wool fleeces wishing spring would come faster so they would not have to wait until June to be sheared. One, named Jean Arthur, seems to be judging me as I bring fresh water and hay. As though she is disappointed in the service and would like to complain to management.

And maybe she has a point, because by the time I finished chores, I was cold and crabby and tired.

Then I remembered I had spent most of the last week driving to set in Minneapolis and St. Paul, hitting rush hour traffic both ways, where what should be an hour-and-a-half drive somehow becomes two hours because everyone is trying to get somewhere slightly faster than everyone else. And suddenly my life here felt different again.

Because my biggest traffic jam this morning was opening the barn door while the sheep, chickens, and geese all tried to come out at once.

There are worse ways to live.

Even on gray days.

Even in May when you are still wearing gloves to do chores and arguing with the weather like it has personally failed you.

Spring is coming.

The lilacs are budding.
The violets are blooming low in the grass.
The dandelions are beginning to scatter themselves across the hay field like little yellow declarations of optimism.

And they are saying seventy degrees by the weekend.

So maybe we will all survive after all.