When I was a kid, I once woke up in the middle of the night in order to bound on down to South Cape Beach in the family’s 1979 Ford F250. On that windy night, my dad and I joined an anonymous assortment of night beachgoers as we peered through a telescope at what we guessed should be Halley’s Comet. I remember inspecting the fuzzy clump before getting back in the truck to go home again.

“The next time you have the chance to see this,” my dad advised me on the way back home, “you will be an old lady.” I remember listening to the low whine of the truck’s steering column through the grey blue air as the notion of age marinated in my nine year old brain.

I woke up this morning thinking about the passage of time, and how the month of May is almost a surreptitious microcosm for life that slides through our collective psychological GPS with little notice. It kind of sneaks behind our consciousness largely because this time of year explodes with so much possibility. We seem to get lost in its tracking as we embark upon a hedonistic land grab that can’t be capitalized upon when mired in the stagnant months that precede and follow springtime. We have so much fun getting out and enjoying our ability to exist that before we know it, May has long since evaporated and we are quickly sliding into a celebration of summer that will leave us completely unprepared to accept the moving underground that is autumn.

But  if you can stop and look around for a little bit- right here where we all currently stand- we can see that May serves as a unique bridge between the past and the future.

Perhaps my perspective is biased- but this time of year is unique in that only a month earlier we fought with lingering snow and ice- and if you begrudgingly look towards June, you can see that the pendulum of extremes will soon complete its swing and hold us captive in the steam bath that becomes summer. It’s coming, and it’s going to happen soon.

But right now, the difference is split.

It’s gonna be a hot one today.

What I like best about waking up during these days is padding out to my picture window and sizing up the horizon. On many mornings this month, the light offers up glorious views that make me want to spend an hour trying to fully capture the fecund tapestry with my underqualified camera. I love this. Conversely, other mornings I have sensed an understated blanket of quiet that hearkens back to colder months- and this presence is confirmed when I walk to the glass and note a near fogging in of the entire city. Sleepy. Almost death-like in a February deep freeze kind of way that urges peace and a life that is seemingly stuck on pause. Yet we’re still in May.

Same view. Different day. Could almost be snowing.

I kind of love the helter-skelter contrasts offered up by this time of the year- and I think this is because I not only appreciate extremes, but also because May’s pace of life keeps me fully engaged in the present. Everything you experience right now feels so ephemeral that you want to get out there and do as much as you possibly can. That’s kind of how our entire life feels when you stretch it out through decades and take stock of your overall experience.

Take the inbound cicadas. Much like Halley’s Comet, soon they’ll be joining you and me in a rare occurrence that will help us to mark an otherwise unconscious appreciation of spring 2013. These bugs will live life at full tilt before they drop away and are largely forgotten again for another 17 years. Living a bit like us on fast-forward: a comet’s flash in the pan. And then before we all know it, we’ll be seventeen years closer to being that old lady, wondering where all the time went between then and now. It’ll be another May, and I have no doubt that we’ll all be outside again and excited to experience the whir of the cicada’s song as their presence joins our joyfully mindless monopoly on springtime.