THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING
By Mari Wolf
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Here is a love story of two young people who met under the magic of festival time. One was Trina, whose world was a gentle make-believe Earth. The other was Max, handsome spaceman, whose world was the infinite universe of space....
The First Day of spring, the man at the weather tower had said, and certainly it felt like spring, with the cool breeze blowing lightly about her and a faint new clover smell borne in from the east. Spring—that meant they would make the days longer now, and the nights shorter, and they would warm the whole world until it was summer again.
Trina laughed aloud at the thought of summer, with its picnics and languid swims in the refilled lakes, with its music and the heavy scent of flowers and the visitors in from space for the festival. She laughed, and urged her horse faster, out of its ambling walk into a trot, a canter, until the wind streamed about her, blowing back her hair, bringing tears to her eyes as she rode homeward toward the eastern horizon—the horizon that looked so far away but wasn't really.
"Trina!"