A JANUARY SUMMER
_When winter winds blow cold and chill
And through the hawthorn howls the gale_
The winter winds were truly cold and chill on this twenty-first of
January here in Massachusetts. And I chance to know they were chill
down along the Delaware this particular January day. I remember many a
January day like this on the wide marshes of the Delaware and in the
big woods along the Maurice River where I was a boy. But I was not
thinking of those days at all here in my New England home, for I was
busy at my desk.
Some one was at my study door. More than one, for I heard low talking.
Then the door softly opened, and four bebundled boys stood before
me--with an axe, a long-handled shovel, a covered basket, and a very
big secret, which stuck out all over their faces.
They were not big boys outside. But they were almost bursting inside
with their big secret. They were big with boots and coats and caps and
mittens; and they looked almost like monsters in my study door with
their axe and shovel and big basket.
“Come on, father,” they whispered (as if _She_ hadn’t heard them
tramping through the hall and upstairs with their kit!), “come on! It’s
mother’s birthday to-morrow, and we’re going after the flowers.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “Are you going to chop the flowers down with
an axe, and dig them up with a shovel?” And I tried to think what a
chopped-down and dug-up birthday bouquet would look like. But it was
too much for me.
“You are going to give her a nice bunch of frost flowers,” I said,
feeling about in my puzzled mind for just what was afoot. “If you are
going to give her frost flowers, you had better get the ice-saw, too,
for we shall need a big block of ice to stick their stems in.”
Not a word of comment! No sign on the four faces that they had even
heard my gentle banter. They knew what they were going to do; and all
they wanted of me was to come along.
“Hurry up,” they answered, dropping my hip-boots on the floor. “Here
are your scuffs.”
I hurried up! Scuffs and boots and cap and reefer on in a jiffy, and
the five of us were soon in single file upon the meadow, the dry snow
squealing under our feet, while the little imp-winds, capering fitfully
about us, blew the snowdust into our faces, or catching up the thin
drifts, sent them whirling and waltzing, like ghostly dancers, over the
meadow’s level glittering floor.
I was beginning to warm up a little; but I was still guessing about the
flowers, and not yet in the spirit of the game.
We were having a hard winter, and the novelty of zero weather was
beginning to wear off--at least to me. The fact was I had intended
to get the birthday flowers down at the greenhouse in the village.
January is an awkward time to have a birthday, anyhow. June is a much
more reasonable month for birthdays, if you gather wild flowers for
the celebration. The fields are full of flowers in June! But here in
January you must go with an axe and a shovel, mittens, rubber-boots,
and reefers! And I confess I couldn’t make head or tail of this festive
trip.
It is a lucky man who has boys, or who knows and “trains,” as our New
Englanders say, with boys. They won’t let him freeze up.
“Come, father,” they say, “get into your scuffs and boots, and hit
the old trail for the woods!” And father drops his pen; bundles up;
“clomps” out in his boots, grumbling at the weather and the boys and
the birthdays and the stiffness in his knees and in his soul--for a
whole hundred yards or more into the meadow! Then he begins to warm up.
Then he takes the axe from one of the boys and looks at its edge, and
“hefts” it; and looks about for a big birthday flower, about the size
of a hundred-year-old oak, to chop down. Something queer is happening
to father. He is forgetting his knees; he is capering about on the
snow; he is getting ahead of the boys; he hardly realizes it, but he is
beginning to feel like a birthday inside of him; and he will soon be in
danger of getting this January day mixed up with the days of June!
But not right off. I was warming up, I do confess, yet it was a numb,
stiff world about us, and bleak and stark. It was a world that looked
all black and white, for there was not a patch of 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 as to shut us
apparently into some vast snow cave. A crow flapping over drew a black
pencil-line across the picture--the one sign of life that we could see
besides ourselves. 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 boys or men ever gone afield on such a tramp
with an axe, a shovel, and a basket.
Suddenly one of the boys dashed off calling, “Let’s go see if the
muskrats have gone to bed yet!” And trailing after him away we went,
straight across the meadow. I knew what he was after; I could see the
little mound, hardly more than an anthill in size, standing up in the
meadow where the alder bushes and elderberry marked the bend in the
brook. If my farmer neighbor had forgotten a small haycock, when he cut
his rowen, it would have looked about as this muskrat lodge here buried
under the snow. I was glad the boys had seen it. For only a practiced
eye could have discovered it; and only a lover of bleak gray days would
have known what might be alive deep down under its thatch of cat-tails
and calamus here in the silent winter.
But is there any day in the whole year out of doors that real live boys
and real live girls do not love? or any wild thing that they do not
love--flower or bird or beast or star or storm?
We crept up softly, and surrounded the lodge; then with the axe we
struck the frozen, flinty roof several ringing blows. Instantly
_one_--_two_--_three_ muffled splashy “plunks” were heard, as three
little muskrats, frightened out of their naps and half out of their
wits, plunged into the open water of their doorways from off their damp
but cozy couch.
It was a mean thing to do, but not very mean as wild animal life goes.
And it did warm me up so, in spite of the chilly plunge the little
sleepers took! Chilly to them? Not at all, and that is why it warmed
me. To hear the splash of water down under the two feet of ice and snow
that sealed the meadow like a sheet of steel! To hear the sound of
stirring life, and to picture that snug, steaming bed on the top of a
tough old tussock, with its open water-doors leading into freedom and
plenty below! “Why, it won’t be long before the arbutus is in bloom,”
I began to think. I looked at the axe and shovel, and said to myself,
“Well, the boys may know what they are doing, after all, though three
muskrats don’t make a spring or a bouquet.”
But they did make me warmer inside and outside, too. Warm up your heart
and you soon feel warmer in your fingers and toes.
We turned back from the muskrats’ lodge and headed again for the woods,
where the flowers must be. Hardly had we reached the cart-path before
another of the boys was off--this time to the left, going rapidly
toward a low piece of maple swamp perhaps a quarter of a mile away.
“He’s going over to see if Hairy Woodpecker is in his hole,” said the
boys in answer to my question. “Hairy has a winter hole over there in a
big dead maple. Want to see him?”
Of course I wanted to see him. The only live thing outside of ourselves
that we had seen (we had only _heard_ the muskrats) had been a crow.
Live birds on such days as these one would go far to see. So we all cut
across toward the swamp where the hairy woodpecker reigned solitary in
his bleak domain.
The “hole” was almost twenty-five feet up in a dead maple stub that had
blown off and lodged against a live tree. The meadow had been bleak
and wind-swept, but the swamp was naked and dead, filled with ice, and
touched with a most forbidding emptiness and stillness. I was getting
cold again, when the boy ahead tapped lightly on the old stub. At the
hole upstairs appeared a head--a fierce black-and-white head, a sharp,
long bill, a flashing eye--as Hairy came forth to fight for his castle.
He was too wise a fighter to tackle all of us, however; so, slipping
out, he spread his wings, and galloped off with a loud wild call that
set all the swamp to ringing.
It was a thrilling, defiant challenge that set my blood to leaping
again. Black and white, he was a part of the picture; but there was a
scarlet band in the nape of his neck that, like his call, had fire in
it and the warmth of life.
As his shout went booming through the hollow walls of the swamp, it
woke a blue jay, which squalled back from a clump of pines, then,
wavering out into the open on curious wings--flashing ice-blue and
snow-white wings--he dived into the covert of pines again; and faint,
as if beyond the swamp, the cheep of chickadees!
If anything was needed up to this moment to change my winter into
spring, it was this call of the chickadees. The dullest day in winter
smiles; the deepest, darkest woods speak cheerfully to me, if a
chickadee is there. And did you ever know a winter day or a dank,
gloomy forest hall without its chickadee? Give me a flower in my
buttonhole and a chickadee in my heart and I am proof against all gloom
and cold.
“What is all this noise about?” the chickadees came forward asking. It
was a little troop of them, a family of them, possibly, last year’s
children and one, or both, of the parents, hunting the winter woods
together for mutual protection against the loneliness and long bitter
cold.
How active and interested in life they were! A hard winter? Yes, of
course, but what is the blue jay squawking over, anyhow? And the little
troop of them came to peep into the racket, curious, but not excited,
discussing the disturbance of the solemn swamp in that sewing-bee
fashion of theirs, as if nipping off threads and squinting through
needle-eyes between their running comments.
They too were gray and black, gray as the swamp beeches, black as the
spotted bark of the birches. And how tiny! But--
“Here was this atom in full breath
Hurling defiance at vast death;
This scrap of valor just for play
Fronts the north wind in waistcoat gray”;
and this is what Emerson says he sings:
“Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places
Where January brings few faces.”
And as I brought to mind the poet’s lines, I forgot to shiver, and
quite warmed again to the idea of flowers, especially as one of the
boys just then brought up a spray of green holly with a burning red
berry on it.
I laid the spray of green holly on the hard white crust of the January
snow. Then I stood a moment and spread my hands out over it to warm
them! It was like a little fire in the snow. The boys laughed at me.
They were warm enough in their mittens. But I had need of more than
mittens to warm my fingers. I had need of a fire,--a fire of green
pointed holly leaves and one glowing, flaming berry, a tiny red hot
coal of summer blazing here in the wide white ashes of the winter.
We were tacking again now in order to get back on our course, and had
got into the edge of the swamp among the pines when the boy with the
shovel began to study the ground and the trees as if trying to find the
location of something.
“Here it is,” he said, and began digging through the snow at the foot
of a big pine. I knew what he was after. It was goldthread, and here
was the only spot in all the woods about where we had ever found it, a
spot no larger than the top of a dining-room table.
Soon we had a fistful of the delicate plants with their evergreen
leaflets and long golden, threadlike roots that, mixed with the red and
green of the partridge-berry in a finger-bowl, make a cheerful winter
bouquet. And here with the goldthread, about the butt of the pine, was
the partridge-berry, too, the dainty vines strung with the beads which
seemed to burn holes in the snow that covered and banked their tiny
fires.
For this is all that the ice and snow had done. The winter had come
with enough wind to blow out every flame in the maple-tops, and with
enough snow to smother every little fire in the peat-bogs of the swamp;
but peat fires are hard to put out; and here and everywhere the winter
had only banked the fires of summer. Dig down through the snow ashes
anywhere, and the smouldering coals of life burst into blaze.
When that red-beaded partridge-vine was hastily placed with the
goldthread in the covered basket, and the spray of holly put with
them, a ray of light began to dawn on my snow-clouded mind. Did I
begin to see the bouquet these boys were after? I said nothing. They
said nothing. They were watching me, though, I knew, to see how long I
should stumble blindly on through these glorious January woods, which
were so full of joy for them.
I say I said nothing. I was thinking hard, however. “Holly, goldthread,
partridge-berry,” I thought to myself. “I see so much of the birthday
bouquet. But what else can they find?”
The boy with the axe had again gone on ahead. And we were off again
after him, stopping to get a great armful of black alder branches that
were literally aflame with red berries.
We were climbing a piny knoll when almost at our feet, jumping us
nearly out of our skins, and warming the very roots of our hair, was
a burrrr! burrrr! burrrr! burrrr!--four big partridges--as if four
snow-mines had exploded under us, hurling bunches of brown feathers on
graceful scaling wings over the dip of the hill!
This was getting livelier all the time. From my study window how dead
and deserted, and windswept and bare the world had looked to me!
Nothing but a live crow winging wearily against the leaden sky! But
out here in the real woods and meadows--partridges, chickadees, hairy
woodpecker, blue jay, and muskrats as well as crows! And then I knew
a certain old apple tree where a pair of screech owls were wintering.
And, as for white-footed mice, I could find them in any stump. Besides,
here were rabbit holes in the snow, and up in a tall pine a gray
squirrel’s nest and--
But I was losing sight of the boy with the axe who was leading the
procession. On we went up over the knoll and down into a low bog where
in the summer we gathered high-bush blueberries, the boy with the axe
leading the way and going straight across the ice toward the middle of
the bog.
My eye was keen for signs, and I soon saw he was heading for a
sweet-pepper bush with a broken branch. My eye took in another bush a
little to the right also with a broken branch. The boy with the axe
walked up to the sweet-pepper bush, and drew a line on the ice between
it and a bush off on the right, pacing off this line till he found the
middle; then he started at right angles from it, and paced off a line
to a clump of cat-tails sticking up through the ice on the flooded bog.
Halfway back on this line he stopped, threw off his coat, and began to
chop a hole about two feet square in the ice. Removing the block of ice
while I looked on, he rolled up his sleeve, and reached down the length
of his arm through the ice water.
“Give me the shovel,” he said, “it’s down here.” And with a few
dexterous cuts he soon brought to the surface a beautiful cluster of
pitcher-plants, the strange, almost uncanny, leaves filled with muddy
water, but every pitcher of them intact, shaped and veined and tinted
by a master potter’s hand.
Now at last I fully understood. Now I could see what those boys had
been seeing with their inward eyes all the time. Now I had faith, too.
But how late! The bouquet of flowers was now full.
We wrapped the wonderful pitcher-plant carefully in newspapers, and put
it into the basket, starting back with our bouquet as cheerfully, and
as full of joy in the season, as we could possible have been in June.
No, I did not say that we love January as much as we love June.
January here in New England is a mixture of rheumatism, chilblains,
frozen water-pipes, mittens, overshoes, blocked trains, and
automobile-troubles by the hoodsful, whereas any automobile will run in
June. It is so in Delaware and Texas and Oregon, too.
What I was saying is that we started home all abloom with our
pitcher-plants and goldthread and partridge-berry and holly and glowing
black alder, and all aglow inside with our vigorous tramp, and with
the gray grave beauty of the landscape, and with the stern joy of
meeting and beating the cold, and with the signs of life--of the cozy
muskrats in their lodge beneath the ice-cap on the meadow; with the
hairy woodpecker in his deep warm hole in the heart of a tree; with the
red warm berries in our basket; with the chirping, the capable, the
conquering chickadee accompanying us and singing,
“For well the soul, if stout within,
Can arm impregnably the skin;
And polar frost my form defied,
Made of the air that blows outside.”
And actually as we came over the bleak meadow, one of the boys said
that he thought he heard a song-sparrow singing! And I said I thought
the pussy-willows by the brook had opened a little since we had passed
them coming out! And we all declared that the weather had changed,
and that there were signs of a break-up. But the thermometer stood at
fifteen above zero when we got home--one degree colder than when we
started!
We had had a January thaw, however, and it had come off inside of us,
as the color on the four glowing faces showed. The birthday came off
on the morrow, and I wonder if there ever was a more interesting or a
more loving gift of flowers than those from the January woods?