That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I expect to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my land—that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a week—there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been severed; they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for. Much water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them too cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing—and low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without help. The temporality of all things—even of the great imperturbable trees—is a thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say morning and evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."
There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started there—dogwoods and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being brought, and violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live, but failed. I think the place where the roots are cut in transplanting should be sealed with wax. A man here said that you can transplant hickories if you get all the roots, but that they bleed to death even in winter, if their laterals are severed.... I want the birds to come to this little wood. Of course, it will be many years before it follows the plan, but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns came whole; the ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started, but that must be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....
I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first summer that I yearn for again—close to the sand, close to the voices of the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.
The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below, and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes. Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths—a trickle of water over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines—something of all this will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.
The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had begun to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a fireplace. I wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and clearer—a blend of patio and broad hearth—running water and red firelight—built of stone and decorated with ivy. A stone house with a roof of wired glass over a patio paved with brick; the area sunken slightly from the entrance; a balcony stretching around to connect the sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad shelf of oak, to hold the palms, urns, ferns and winter plants.
All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it—and as yet, there wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.