“The birds will make the corners,” I explained patiently. “Before I’ve been putting out crumbs a month there’ll be bird pikes cutting through the place at every conceivable angle, and crossing each other under that seven-trunked maple where my cot will be. And if that won’t be bird corners, what will?”
So we prepared for our homing flight. Uncle Milton went out at once to trim the trees and prune the shrubbery and vines; and the occasional days he bestowed on us in town were full of delight for me, filled as they were with reports of progress at home. For it was home, before dirt had been broken for the house; the city dwelling was a mere temporary shelter.
“De jonquils out home is showin’ up fine,” he announced one morning in mid-February; “hit’s time to sorter stir up dese yere lazy town flowers. En I’ll trim de trees, too, seein’ I’m ’bout done wid ’em out home. I ’spec de city folks what’ll live yere atter we-all gone’ll want what little dab er trees dey got in dis yard.”
He looked scornfully at the back yard, generous in size, after the fashion of our Southern cities, and shaded with fine old trees. But a little later, high in the hackberry, his love of all earth-rooted things swept contempt from his heart, and his dark old face shone with happiness as he wielded the hatchet with rhythmic strokes.
That is always the beginning of the spring work—the severance of death from life, that life may rise again, even out of death. Where would life draw this dead matter next? To darkness first, to growth most surely, and perchance, some day, to wings. And the dark old man with the happy face was servitor of life—life for the dead as for the living; for death is but the underside of life.
We went home early in May. The house would not be finished until October; but outdoors was all ready for us, and we could not waste the summer for lack of a house.
“You know,” I argued to the Peon, “we had a beautiful time in the mountains last summer; and we slept in a two-roomed cottage with only weather-boarding between us and the trees outside. Why can’t we have a shed with a gasoline stove, and a couple of tents to live in?”
So we had them. The Peon and David drove in to Chatterton daily and took the train for business and school; and I fed the birds and followed Uncle Milton, and drank in the changing beauties of earth and sky. And all summer we watched our home grow, from cellar to roof-tree, till it became a thing complete, and fitted into the landscape for which it was designed.
We set it on the old home’s hill, which overlooked the countryside, and faced it toward the sunrising. The dark lines of cedars which had bordered the approach to the old house were left at one side, and the road, curving from their upper end, swept into full sunshine and passed under a great beech, which spread its tiers of leaves above the doorway. It is an unpretentious house, rambling about pretty much as it pleases in its efforts to give southern and eastern and western exposures to all the rooms. Porches are everywhere, and the windows either open on them, like doors, or stop a little above the floor at low, cushioned seats, which tempt one to sink down and wonder once again at the beauty of this fair country of middle Tennessee. There are no curtains at the windows, nor mats of vines outside. But up the widely-separated columns of the porches run clematis and jasmines which cross the great openings in narrow bands, above and below. So all summer the fretwork of green leaves frames the landscape, a perfect, yet everchanging picture in each of the wide spaces. The east end of the living-room is of glass, and my flowers flourish there in winter time. In my own room the bed stands in a deep recess formed all of windows on the three sides. A low seat runs under them within reach of the bed. All through the dark, sleepless night I can lie there and watch for the first paling of the eastern sky, and follow the level light as it moves softly along the southern hills, creating the shadows which make the light so clear.