May Day Read Online Free
going to happen for me in Battle Lake. I could feel the buzz in the air like the hum of bees.
Once the head librarian, Lartel McManus, saw I had a knack for the library job, he flew to Mexico on a three-week vacation he said he had planned for months. Friday, May 1, was to be my first official day alone at the Battle Lake Public Library. May Day had always been one of my favorite holidays. When I was ten, my dad sneaked into my room and left a foam cup decorated with pastel ribbons and filled with waxy Tootsie Rolls and cherry-flavored Dubble Bubble gum. I pretended I was asleep until I heard his footsteps on the creaky stairs. The note read “Happy May Day! You know I love you.”
I wondered about the power of small gestures as I woke up without an alarm clock on May Day, and I actually whistled as I slipped out of bed. The night before, I had ceremoniously dumped out all the bottles of liquor in Sunny’s house, and I arose reborn. I decided to go to town early to open a savings account with my sixty dollars cash. Call me an optimist. The seven-minute ride to town was beautiful, with young morning fog webbing the low spots by the sloughs. The air had that waiting-for-the-school-bus smell, and through some cosmic wrinkle, I could actually tune in the good radio station out of Fargo. Sheryl Crow commiserated melodically with me as I pulled toward town.
There were short stretches of road where I couldn’t see any houses, just oak and sumac pressing against the air. It brought to mind the research I had just finished for the second part-time job I had landed as an on-call reporter for the Battle Lake Recall , the local newspaper. The library job alone didn’t pay enough to cover my student loan payments and buy gas and groceries, and besides, I needed to keep my English muscle in shape for when I went back to grad school.
For my first article, I wrote a retrospective piece for the Battle Lake Lady of the Lakes celebration, the first festival of the year. It marked the end of winter and the beginning of the farming season and involved an all-town garage sale, a parade, and a dance at Stub’s. The celebration wasn’t until Memorial Day, but the chamber of commerce wanted to get the word out so they could sign up people for the parade. On the surface, Battle Lake was your average Minnesota town with a population under a thousand—most of the residents were farmers or blue-collar workers, most radios were tuned to the country music station, everybody ate their lunch at the Turtle Stew Café, and the whole area bloated with tourists in search of the perfect fish every summer. My piece delved below the surface, however. It was a full-page article, complete with photos, on the official founding of Battle Lake on Halloween Eve 1881.
As I drove into town, I cracked my window and sucked in some fresh air, thinking how similar it may have smelled a hundred years ago. I stopped near the curb in front of First National Bank, which was tucked on a corner of Main Street. The Battle Lake Public Library, Lakes Area Dental, and a temporarily abandoned building that used to be Kathy’s Klassy Klothes occupied the other three corners. Laid out alongside each of these cornerstones were little knickknack and antique stores, a bakery, a couple hardware stores, a drugstore,
a post office, a church, and various service offices—chiropractor, accountant, Realtor. Standard small-town fare. I saw that the bank was still closed, so I pulled into the library parking lot.
The yellow brick structure was a relatively new addition to the town, built twenty years ago, when William T. Everts had bequeathed his entire estate to create it. The library’s inside smelled like slick magazine paper and recycled air, as it had every morning since I had started working there over a month ago. I walked past the rack of new arrivals, sniffing at Deer Hunter’s Digest , Good Housekeeping , and Bow and Arrow World . The irony, I thought, of magazines created
Once the head librarian, Lartel McManus, saw I had a knack for the library job, he flew to Mexico on a three-week vacation he said he had planned for months. Friday, May 1, was to be my first official day alone at the Battle Lake Public Library. May Day had always been one of my favorite holidays. When I was ten, my dad sneaked into my room and left a foam cup decorated with pastel ribbons and filled with waxy Tootsie Rolls and cherry-flavored Dubble Bubble gum. I pretended I was asleep until I heard his footsteps on the creaky stairs. The note read “Happy May Day! You know I love you.”
I wondered about the power of small gestures as I woke up without an alarm clock on May Day, and I actually whistled as I slipped out of bed. The night before, I had ceremoniously dumped out all the bottles of liquor in Sunny’s house, and I arose reborn. I decided to go to town early to open a savings account with my sixty dollars cash. Call me an optimist. The seven-minute ride to town was beautiful, with young morning fog webbing the low spots by the sloughs. The air had that waiting-for-the-school-bus smell, and through some cosmic wrinkle, I could actually tune in the good radio station out of Fargo. Sheryl Crow commiserated melodically with me as I pulled toward town.
There were short stretches of road where I couldn’t see any houses, just oak and sumac pressing against the air. It brought to mind the research I had just finished for the second part-time job I had landed as an on-call reporter for the Battle Lake Recall , the local newspaper. The library job alone didn’t pay enough to cover my student loan payments and buy gas and groceries, and besides, I needed to keep my English muscle in shape for when I went back to grad school.
For my first article, I wrote a retrospective piece for the Battle Lake Lady of the Lakes celebration, the first festival of the year. It marked the end of winter and the beginning of the farming season and involved an all-town garage sale, a parade, and a dance at Stub’s. The celebration wasn’t until Memorial Day, but the chamber of commerce wanted to get the word out so they could sign up people for the parade. On the surface, Battle Lake was your average Minnesota town with a population under a thousand—most of the residents were farmers or blue-collar workers, most radios were tuned to the country music station, everybody ate their lunch at the Turtle Stew Café, and the whole area bloated with tourists in search of the perfect fish every summer. My piece delved below the surface, however. It was a full-page article, complete with photos, on the official founding of Battle Lake on Halloween Eve 1881.
As I drove into town, I cracked my window and sucked in some fresh air, thinking how similar it may have smelled a hundred years ago. I stopped near the curb in front of First National Bank, which was tucked on a corner of Main Street. The Battle Lake Public Library, Lakes Area Dental, and a temporarily abandoned building that used to be Kathy’s Klassy Klothes occupied the other three corners. Laid out alongside each of these cornerstones were little knickknack and antique stores, a bakery, a couple hardware stores, a drugstore,
a post office, a church, and various service offices—chiropractor, accountant, Realtor. Standard small-town fare. I saw that the bank was still closed, so I pulled into the library parking lot.
The yellow brick structure was a relatively new addition to the town, built twenty years ago, when William T. Everts had bequeathed his entire estate to create it. The library’s inside smelled like slick magazine paper and recycled air, as it had every morning since I had started working there over a month ago. I walked past the rack of new arrivals, sniffing at Deer Hunter’s Digest , Good Housekeeping , and Bow and Arrow World . The irony, I thought, of magazines created
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