There is only one thing more tragic to a small boy than having a little sister to bother him. That is having an elder sister to “boss” him.
There were rainy days, too, when we explored old attics, playing among heirlooms and relics that to-day would be worth much money. There were days when we invented weird pastimes in the fantastic nooks, crannies and haylofts of two fragrant country barns.
Sometimes in the spring, when the winter is breaking up and the soil is coming through in patches, sweet and wet, I catch a breath of fragrance from those Foxboro play-times. I smell again the clear, cool, pungent dampness of woodland ravines where we poked noisy leaves aside to find the first mayflowers. The odor of summer pastures in the sunset comes to me and the sweet scent of ripening huckleberries, briarbloom and fern. Autumn brings its scents and odors, too—crimson sumach and bursting milkweed; the acrid sweetness of loaded apple trees with windfallen fruit knobbing the ground beneath; old goldenrod; the sharp nip of frost-bitten air blowing fitfully across the hills on afternoons when the earth shivered in the nakedness of fall and the sky was a museum of cloud. Then winter came with gray days—soft-muffled, snow-heavy—moist mornings, dripping noons, melancholy twilights when even the carmine of the sinking sun was freezing cold; then the piercing stab of blue crystal nights when the stars were very high and the panes of windows in empty rooms were weirdly padded with frost.
Who can fathom the heart of a boy? I recall these items especially here, because there were times when I would find my friend indisposed to play. Often in these seasons and settings, he would stop and grow strangely silent. “It’s so pretty, Billy, it hurts,” he would tell me. “It makes me—afraid!”
One summer evening we sat on the Forge front steps under the stars. The crickets were cheeping about us. Now and then we saw ghostly petals of syringa blossoms flutter down in the shadows beneath, the world voluptuous with summer scents about us.
“I feel as if I’d like to write and tell somebody all about it, Billy,” he said to me.
“Tell ’em what?”
“How it hurts!”
“How what hurts?”
“Oh—the world—and starry nights—just livin’ in it all. It’s holy somehow—like church.”