They hang me
in May.

I had prepared myself for a quiet spring. The paper would come down, the door would be scrubbed, and I could spend a few months pretending nobody needed a guardian. Then the fifth month arrived, wet as a sleeve, and someone put me up again.

This time I was not outside, staring down a lane. I was on a wall in the main room, above a table with long green leaves, a red flower, and a bowl that caught the weather. It is an intimate place to be assigned a frightening face. From there I could see the room make its ordinary calculations: windows open, rain coming in sideways, somebody wondering whether the heat had arrived too early.

I began to understand that a season does not need to announce its danger in the same language as winter. At the year’s end, people worry about what has accumulated. In the fifth month, the worry is closer to the skin: dampness, illness, things that spoil, things that enter without knocking. A picture on the wall cannot solve any of that. But it can give a household a shape for its attention.

When people hang me indoors, I become less of a warning and more of a question.

I do not want to make too much of one room in one place. Not every family hung my picture in May. Not every fifth-month custom had my name on it. There were leaves, drinks, strings, boats, flowers, and many other ways of making a season feel manageable. I am one visitor among them, not the owner of the month.

Still, I like the change. At a door, I am asked to keep something out. In a room, I am asked to notice what has already arrived: the smell of rain, the tiredness in a voice, the small object that has gone missing, the person who has not come home. It is a harder task, and a kinder one.

Next I will ask the question the calendar keeps avoiding. If I appear in both winter and early summer, is it the date that matters—or what the people behind the door are trying to live through?