The first cutting of hay is down on farm fields around the Vineyard, another marker for the season at hand as the calendar flips from May to June. The air is alive with pollen — oak, pine, grasses and the newly-mown hay are all culprits in what seems at times like an air-borne conspiracy against the legions of Islanders who suffer from seasonal allergies.

But still, the fields beckon. Hay fields, green and stubbly, soon will grow up thickly again as red and white clover, timothy and alfalfa. On working farms, row crops are elegant and symmetrical, still ahead of weeds that will eventually compete for the air, water and soil that nourish lettuce, peas and beans.

Old wildflower fields too are beautiful right now, layered with oxeye daisies, buttercups, still-green yarrow and the first shoots of wild carrot. They are worthy of a French impressionist painting.

“Nature has no object lessons, but June and summer bring the undeniable truth of growth and continuity,” the nature writer Hal Borland wrote. “Every field, every meadow, every roadside is now rich with the proof of sustaining abundance, evidence that the earth is essentially a hospitable place no matter what follies man may commit. June invites man to know these things, to know sun and rain and grass and trees and growing fields. It is a season for repairing the perspective, for admitting, however privately, that there are forces and rhythms that transcend man’s particular and transient plans.”