We were burying snow. Calista Waters had told us about it, when, late in April, snow was found under a pile of wood in our yard. We wondered why we had never thought of it before when snow was plentiful. We had two long tins which had once contained ginger wafers. These were to be packed with snow, fastened tight as to covers, and laid deep in the earth at a distance which, by means of spoons and hot water, we were now fast approaching.
It was Spring-in-earnest. The sun was warm, robins were running on the grass, already faintly greened where the snow had but just melted; a clear little stream flowed down the garden path and out under the cross-walk. The Wells’s barn-doors stood open, somebody was beating a carpet, there was a hint of bonfire smoke in the air, there were little stirrings and sounds that belonged to Spring as the gasoline wood-cutter belonged to Fall.
“And then,” she said, “some hot Summer day, when they’re all sitting out on the lawn in the shade, with thin dresses and palm-leaf fans, we’ll come and dig it up, and carry ’em big plates of feathery white snow, with a spoon stuck in.”
We were silent, picturing their delight.
“Miss Messmore says,” I ventured, not without hesitation, “that snow is all bugs.”
In fact all of us had been warned without ceasing not to eat snow—but there were certain spots where it was beyond human power to resist it: Mr. Britt’s fence, for instance, on whose pickets little squares of snow rested, which, eaten off by direct application of the lips, produced a slight illusion of partaking of caramels.
Delia stopped digging. “Maybe they won’t eat it when we bring it to them in Summer?” she suggested.
“Then we will,” said Calista, promptly. Of course they would not have the heart to forbid us to eat it in, say, June.
About a foot down in the ground we set the two tins side by side in an aperture lined and packed with snow and filled in with earth. Over it we made a mound of all the snow we could find in the garden. Then we adjourned to the woodshed and sat on the sill and the sawbuck and the work-bench.