CHAPTER VI—SPRING
April 3. Last night the river “went out.” We were so used, all winter, to its sleeping whiteness, that it seemed as unlikely to change as the outlines of the hills; then came a tumultuous week, and now it is a brown, strong, full-running stream, with swirls and whirlpools of hastening current all over its wide surface. These are indescribable days. The air is sweet with wet bark and melting snow and newly-uncovered earth. The lesser streams are rushing and roaring through the woods. There are little clear dark foam-topped pools under all the spouts, and bright drops falling from rocks and roofs, where there were icicles so lately; and the roads endure miniature floods, from the torrents of snow-water that gush down their gutters and spread the mud in fan-shapes over them. Wherever you stand, you cannot get away from the rushing and trickling and rilling. The whole frozen strength of winter is breaking up in a wealth of life-giving waters.
There is a neglected-looking time for the fields just after the snow goes. The snow-patches recede and leave the soaked grass covered with odds and ends of loose sticks and roots and with untidy wefts of cobweb. The dead leaves lie limp and dank, and are of lovely but sad colors, soft browns and umbers, ash-grays and ash-purples; but in the midst of this waste the ponds are all awake—dimpling, soft water, tender and alive—and their bright blue is a new wonder after our winter world of white and brown and gray.
Robins came yesterday. Their crisp voices woke us with a start, after the winter’s silence. They were busy all over the lawn, and nearly a week ago we heard the first blue-birds and meadow-larks.
The fir boughs that were banked about the houses last fall, for warmth, must be burnt, and bonfires are being lighted all about the fields and gardens. They blaze up into a crackling roar of burning brush, and the smoke comes pouring and creaming out in thick white torrents. The clean, hilarious smell spreads everywhere, the touch of it clings to our hair and clothing. This is a wonderful, Indian time for children, when all sorts of strange inherited knowledge stirs in them. Look at their eyes, as they play and plan round their fires!
THE SOUTH WIND IN MARCH
Cumulus clouds came back, as always, with late winter. Through the autumn, and early winter, clear days are practically cloudless; and cloud-masses, cirrus, not cumulus, herald and follow storms; but with February, the clear-weather summer clouds return. They begin to be trim again, and marshaled, and take up the ordered leisurely sailing of their pretty squadrons.
April 10.
There is already a general warming and yellowing of twigs. The elm tops are growing feathery and show a warm brown, and a crimson-coral mist begins to flush over the low-lying woods, where the swamp maples are in flower. Pussy-willows are as thick on their twigs as drops after a rain, and as silvery. You would say at first that nothing had changed yet in the main forest. The brown aisles and misty dark hollows seem the same, but no; fringed about the openings and coverts along their borders the birch and alder catkins are in flower. They are powdery and gold-colored, and overhead they dangle like the tails of little fairy sheep against the sky.
The wild geese woke us in the dark, just before dawn, this morning. Last year there was a violent snow-storm, a perfect smothering whirl of flakes, the night they flew over, and the great birds were beaten down among the house-tops, creakling and honkling in dismay and confusion, but holding on their way.
Now at dusk comes the first silvery evening whistling of the frogs, the peepers. If a cloud passes over the sun, even as early as three in the afternoon, they start up as if at a signal, all together, and as the sun shines out again fall instantly silent.
May 3.
All this time the green has been spreading and spreading through the pastures till now it clothes them, and the dandelions are scattered over them like a king’s largesse. Dew falls all winter, but it is in star and fern shapes of frost; now every morning and evening the thick grass is pearled again with a million nourishing drops.
Now rainbow colors begin to show over the hillsides. It is as if a thousand and a thousand tiny butterflies, pink and cream color and living green and crimson, had alighted in the woods. Light comes through them, and they give back light, from the shining, fine down that covers them. The little leaves are almost like clear jewels against the sun, beaded all over the twigs. They only make a slightly dotted veil as yet, they do not hide or screen. You can see as far into the wood-openings as in winter. The brown stems and branches are as delicate and distinct as those of a bed of maiden-hair fern.
The roadside willows are puffs of gold-green smoke, the sapling birches and quaking aspens like green mounting flames up the hillsides, and the catkins of the canoe birches shine like the mist of gold sparks from a rocket.
The different trees develop by different stages, and each stands out in turn against its fellows, as if illuminated, before it loses itself in the growing sea of green. You see its full leafy shape, the mass of each round top, as at no other time of year; yet the individual habit of branching is still manifest, as in winter: the long springing sprays of the swamp maples, the more compact strong branches of the oaks, the maze-like firm twigs of the hop-hornbeams, lying in whorls and layers. The branchlets of the beeches are like thorns. The elms are soft brown spirits of trees throughout the woods; their entire fern-like outline is silhouetted, and the swamp maples stand like delicate living shapes of bronze.
Innocents are out in patches in the pastures, looking as if white powder had been spilt. Purple and white hepaticas are clustered in crannies of the rocks, and after a rain mayflowers stand up thick, thick in the fields, in masses of pink and white fragrance. Blood-root covers whole banks with snow-white, and dog-tooth violets, littlest of lilies, nod their yellow-and-brown prettiness over the slopes carpeted with their strange mottled leaves.
Shad-bush is out now in fairy white, tasseled over knolls and hillsides and overhanging wooded banks along the streams. Its opening leaves are reddish, delicately serrate, and finely downy. The pure white flowers are loosely starred all over it. They are long-petaled and lightly hung, and the tree is slender and very pliable, the whole thing suggesting a delicate raggedness, as if young Spring went lightly on bare feet with fluttering clothes.
This is the most fairy-scented time of the whole year. “The wood-bine spices are wafted abroad,” indeed. The willows perfume the lanes with their intoxicating sweetness; and there is a cool pure dawn-like fragrance everywhere, from the countless millions of opening leaves, steeped every night with dew.
Last week we saw the first swallows. There they skimmed and flew, as if they had never gone to other skies at all. Their flight is so effortless, they seem to pour and stream down unseen cataracts of air. To-day chimney-swallows came, and we watched their endless rippling and circling. They sailed and wheeled, in little companies or singly, now twittering and now silent, and from now on all summer the sky will never be empty of their beautiful activities.
May 26.
At last the woods are like a garden of delicate flowers, clothing the hills as far as eye can see with colors of sunrise. The red-oaks are gold color, with strong brown stems; ash and lindens are golden green; maples soft copper and bronze, or deep flesh-color.
The flower-like delicacy of leafing out is wonderfully prolonged. The willows come first, then elms, in brown flower, then quaking-asps and birches, and then maples. Later, lindens and ash-trees catch the light, and the ash leaves (which grow far apart, and in bunches, with the flower-buds) are indeed like just-alighted butterflies. The small leaves are so bright that even in the rain they shine as if a shaft of sunlight from some unseen break in the clouds were lighting the woods.
Now long shining leaf buds show among the elm flowers and on the beeches. The later poplars are cream-white and as downy as velvet. A wood of maples and poplars is almost a pink-and-white wood; shell-pink, and palest, most silvery-and-creamy gray.
The tall gold-colored red-oaks make masses of strong color; and later, when we think the shimmering of the fairy rainbow is fading, the white oaks come out in a mist of pale carnation—pink and gray and cream.
In June, after all the hardwoods have merged into uniform light green, firs and spruces become jeweled at every point with tips of light, the new growth for the year. Red pines and white pines are set all over with candelabra of lighter green, until high on the tops of the seeding white pines little clusters of finger-slender pale green cones begin to show.
By this time the forest-flowers have faded through the woods. The brighter colors of the field-flowers are gay along the roadsides and over meadows and pastures, and with them Summer has come.