May Day eve ingredients: water from River Allen, soft, bright pebbles from its margins, small boulder, elbow grease. Outdoors, so much beauty, barely hidden under a veil of finest buff silt, which the loving, roving eye can peer through. All returned to Earth in the rain, as it should be. Indoors, one of the remaining pleasures of Substack, (despite the developers’ seemingly fervent desire to trash the joint), is the opportunity to converse with readers and writers in long comments after articles.