Yesterday morning, riding towards the cypress woods, I had the first
impression of spring; and, in fact, to-day the first almond-tree had
come out in blossom on our hillside.
A cool morning; loose, quickly moving clouds, and every now and then a
gust of rain swept down from the mountains. The path followed a brook,
descending in long, steep steps from the hillside; water perfectly
clear, bubbling along the yellow stones between the grassy banks and
making now and then a little leap into a lower basin; along the stream
great screens of reeds, sere, pale, with barely a pennon of leaves,
rustling ready for the sickle; and behind, beneath the watery sky,
rainy but somehow peaceful, the russet oak-scrub of the hill. Of
spring there was indeed visible only the green of the young wheat
beneath the olives; not a bud as yet had moved. And still, it is
spring. The world is renewing itself. One feels it in the gusts of
cool, wet wind, the songs of the reeds, the bubble of the brook; one
feels it, above all, in oneself. All things are braced, elastic, ready
for life.