May

May is a recurring calendar and seasonal marker in Lipce, joining communal religious practice to the material pressures of the agricultural year. Its greenery and Whitsuntide gatherings suggest renewal, but late May brings punishing heat, damaged crops, and mounting preharvest hardship; the month’s significance lies in that uneasy passage from spring observance toward summer scarcity.

Seasonal Setting

May is presented as a time of change rather than secure abundance. Near the month’s end, the weather is already scorching as July: vegetables wilt yellow, fallow grass is seared, streams run dry, and potato stalks that had started well barely cover the ground. Winter crops fare better, growing tall and heavy-headed, but their relative success does not erase the threat to other food and livelihoods.

The pressure extends beyond the fields. The nights are so stifling and humid that people sleep in orchards because their houses are unbearable. Heat, hardship, and the village’s political unrest combine to make the period unusually quarrelsome. Płoszka’s campaign against Voyt adds to the strain, while the preharvest days are described as harder than in previous years. May therefore registers both seasonal growth and the vulnerability of a community waiting for the harvest.

May Devotion and the Wayside Shrine

May also has a recurring devotional rhythm. Each year, the girls decorate an old wayside shrine at the cemetery gate with paper ribbons and a golden crown, then scatter it with meadow flowers. Their care briefly adorns a structure otherwise marked by age and neglect: it is cracked, falling into disrepair, and no longer a place where birds nest. The annual decoration makes May a time when communal religious attention is renewed even around a deteriorating sacred place.

On one occasion near the end of May, that observance takes place because the ordinary church service is unavailable. The Parish Priest and the organist have gone to the indulgences, while Ambrozy, drunk after spending time with Germans who often visit the inn, is unable to ring the Angelus or open the church. The villagers gather instead at the cemetery shrine. They quickly dress it with greenery and flowers, sweep away rubbish, scatter yellow sand, set candles and lights at the statue’s feet, and kneel to pray. The interruption changes the setting, not the community’s impulse to worship: people collectively prepare the neglected shrine and make it a temporary focus of devotion.

Whitsuntide and Communal Return

May’s religious calendar also frames Rocho’s unexpected return. At Whitsuntide, while the May greenery still decorates the cottages, he appears in Lipce early one morning after Mass and a long conversation with The Parish Priest. The timing gives his return a communal setting: villagers have not seen him for a long time, and word of his passage sends people from their farmsteads into the road to greet him.

Rocho is described as much as ever, leaning on his stick in a grey capote, rosaries around his neck, and grey hair ruffled by the wind. He smiles at the cottages and orchards, greets people individually, and strokes the heads of children gathered around him. The seasonal greenery persists as a visible sign of shared village life, while the greetings show how his return restores personal connections within it.

Renewal and Preharvest Anxiety

The month’s meaning is consequently double. Its flowers, greenery, and religious observances give May a language of renewal, and the shrine ritual shows that devotional life can adapt when the church itself is inaccessible. Yet the late-May heat offers no simple promise of plenty: dry streams, withering vegetables, and weak potato growth make the approaching preharvest period especially precarious. The contrast keeps seasonal renewal from becoming a merely celebratory image. In Lipce, the calendar brings people together in worship and welcome, while the weather and crop cycle continually expose how much their security depends on conditions they cannot control.