A Northern Countryside

by Rosalind Richards

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.