Cats and Trails and Garden Tales
Musings on cats, travel, gardens and life
May Day May Day and all is Well!
I don’t know why May Day is used to sound the alarm when from where I sit, it is a glorious day – soaking my bones in the hot tub, I can see the house finches busily working in their nest across the backyard.
They return every year to the arborvitae, a rather dull garden shrub where they find refuge inside.
I watch them drop down to the garden beds below, where it seems to me the missus does all the work while the mister stands guard.
They return with building materials and disappear back inside the shrubs.
I think they appreciate the maple tree behind and the clematis nearby.
I know I do.
Today, on this beautiful first day of May, we are expecting temperatures into the upper seventies. Hooray! So why use ‘mayday’ as a distress call? Here’s the history according to Wikipedia.
“The “mayday” procedure word was conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport, England. He had been asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Since much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the term “mayday”, the phonetic equivalent of the French m’aider (a short form of venez m’aider, “come [and] help me”). (M’aidez is non-standard French; the phrase Aidez moi is standard.) The term is unrelated to the holiday May Day.”
So now you know! When used in an emergency it is repeated three times, mayday-mayday-mayday!
But I shall say it once!
Happy May Day!
~ Susanne
Cats and Trails and Garden Tales 
I can’t believe you have your phone or camera with you, taking photos from the hot tub! This is so funny!
I don’t take my phone or camera with me in the hot tub. I was totally relaxed, while watching them from a distance. When I got out they were still active, so I got my camera and took some pictures 🙂
mid 70’s in Central Park and all of the cherry blossoms are out!
Beautiful! A gorgeous spring day!
Fabulous photos. The little birds look happy.
Thank you! I love those little birds and am happy they choose to nest in my yard!
They know a welcoming yard when they see one.
may day is lovely in your neck of the woods
Yes, indeed! We finally got some much needed good weather! 🙂
🍃🙂🍃 so glad
Your backyard is beautiful! The little birds are so cute!
Thank you!
You are welcome! 🙏🏻😊
Stunning clematis! and thanks for the clarification on the origin of the mayday call, I didn’t know that!
Thank you! My Montana Clematis is the star of my May garden. 😊 And I just learned about the origin of the mayday call, when I got curious creating this post!
Happy May Day!
Thank you!
We’ve been having a mini heatwave here in London too, with the hottest May Day on record (29 degrees C which is 84 F), although it’s about to get much cooler again. I love your clematis, and what fun to be able to watch the birds from your hot tub 🙂
Wow! Yesterday was our best day of the week and it must have been close to 80. Locals were in bathing suits and on the beaches! We’ll be cooling down here again for the next few days. I hadn’t been in the hot tub since last year, and I loved watching the birds!
I was taught the origin of ‘Mayday’ when I was studying French in senior school. Good to see your garden visitors, we had a very hot day on the first, 81F. In England, that is almost considered to be ‘too hot’! We drove to the coast to enjoy the sea air and the breeze off the beach.
Best wishes, Pete.
Makes sense that you would learn the origin of ‘Mayday,’ especially when it was coined in England! I never thought much about it until I wrote this post and got curious! Your day was much like ours yesterday. No better place to go than to the coast for fresh sea air! We visited the Locks in Seattle, which I hope to share about someday. 🙂
Wow! I love anything to do with languages, so I enjoyed reading about where the term “Mayday” came from. Makes perfect sense, now that you explained it! 😀
Interesting, right? I never really thought about it until I looked it up when writing this post! Glad you enjoyed it!
Amazing what we learn while researching for blog posts!😀