A JANUARY THAW
Dallas Lore Sharp
It was the twenty-first of January—the dead of winter! The stubborn cold had had the out of doors under lock and key since Thanksgiving Day. We were having a hard winter, and the novelty of the thing was beginning to wear off—to us grown-ups anyhow, and to the birds and wild things which for weeks had found scant picking over the ice and snow. But I was snug enough in my upstairs study, when suddenly the door opened and four bebundled boys stood before me, with an axe, a long-handled shovel, a basket, and, evidently, a big secret.
“Come on, father,” they whispered (as if she hadn’t heard them clomping with their kit through the house!), “it’s mother’s birthday to-morrow, and we’re going after the flowers.”
“Going to chop them down with the axe or dig them up with the shovel?” I asked. “Going to give her a nice bunch of frost-flowers? Better get the ice-saw then, for we’ll need a big block of ice to stick their stems in.”
“Hurry,” they answered, dropping my hip-boots on the floor. “Here are your scuffs.”
I hurried, and soon the five of us, in single file were out on the meadow, the dry snow squeaking under our feet, while the little winds, capering spitefully about us, blew the snow-dust into our faces or catching up the thin drifts sent them whirling like waltzing wraiths of dancers over the meadow’s glittering floor.
I was beginning to warm up a little, but it was a numb, stiff world about us, and bleak and stark, a world all black and white, for there was not even blue overhead. The white underfoot ran off to meet the black of the woods, and the woods in turn stood dark against a sky so heavy with snow that it seemed to shut us into some vast snow cave. A crow flapping over drew a black pencil line across the picture—the one sign of life besides ourselves that we could see. Only small boys are likely to leave their firesides on such a day—only small boys, and those men who can’t grow up. Yet never before, perhaps, had even they gone out on such a tramp with an axe, a shovel, and a basket, to pick flowers!