Dear Hannah, Congratulations on your Graduation. May You Go Far. Love, FFO (Because Yes, We Hijacked Your Title to Tell You That in Front of All These People)

Spring: the season of tulips, robins, baby animals, and—if you live in Utah—freak hail storms, apparently. Come on May, get it together already.

Spring is also the season of graduations. It’s the season for romance. And it’s the start of wedding season. Spring is a season of change and transformation, a time when world religions and people of a thoughtful nature acknowledge the many processes of birth, death, and rebirth occurring all around us. It’s a time for spring cleaning, for removing the junk from our lives and our homes and our gardens to make room for new growth. Or not.

Netflix anyone?

Spring is also a great time for watching videos of adorable baby bunnies. Like this one: https://imgur.com/OXPNJJz.

Our stories this month all meditate on the theme of transformation in one way or another. “The Peculiar Grace of Bees” by Jennifer Johnson is a story of breaking, of rebuilding, and of healing. “The Machine of the Devil” by Maria Haskins is about the transformative power of words and memory in even the darkest places. And there is no larger transformation that humans experience than the transformation from living to dead—unless you count the transformation of a whole lot of people from living to dead. “The Stars That Fall” by Samantha Murray and “Waiting for the Floor OR The Bathers” by Natalia Theodoridou (originally published in Litro) each give us their own take on the apocalypse—as doom falling from the sky or as a rising, inescapable flood.