April 3. Last night the river "went out." We were so used, all winter,
to its sleeping whiteness, that it seemed as unlikely to change as the
outlines of the hills; then came a tumultuous week, and now it is a
brown, strong, full-running stream, with swirls and whirlpools of
hastening current all over its wide surface. These are indescribable
days. The air is sweet with wet bark and melting snow and
newly-uncovered earth. The lesser streams are rushing and roaring
through the woods. There are little clear dark foam-topped pools under
all the spouts, and bright drops falling from rocks and roofs, where
there were icicles so lately; and the roads endure miniature floods,
from the torrents of snow-water that gush down their gutters and spread
the mud in fan-shapes over them. Wherever you stand, you cannot get away
from the rushing and trickling and rilling. The whole frozen strength of
winter is breaking up in a wealth of life-giving waters.
There is a neglected-looking time for the fields just after the snow
goes. The snow-patches recede and leave the soaked grass covered with
odds and ends of loose sticks and roots and with untidy wefts of cobweb.
The dead leaves lie limp and dank, and are of lovely but sad colors,
soft browns and umbers, ash-grays and ash-purples; but in the midst of
this waste the ponds are all awake--dimpling, soft water, tender and
alive--and their bright blue is a new wonder after our winter world of
white and brown and gray.
Robins came yesterday. Their crisp voices woke us with a start, after
the winter's silence. They were busy all over the lawn, and nearly a
week ago we heard the first blue-birds and meadow-larks.
The fir boughs that were banked about the houses last fall, for warmth,
must be burnt, and bonfires are being lighted all about the fields and
gardens. They blaze up into a crackling roar of burning brush, and the
smoke comes pouring and creaming out in thick white torrents. The clean,
hilarious smell spreads everywhere, the touch of it clings to our hair
and clothing. This is a wonderful, Indian time for children, when all
sorts of strange inherited knowledge stirs in them. Look at their eyes,
as they play and plan round their fires!
[Illustration: THE SOUTH WIND IN MARCH]
Cumulus clouds came back, as always, with late winter. Through the
autumn, and early winter, clear days are practically cloudless; and
cloud-masses, cirrus, not cumulus, herald and follow storms; but with
February, the clear-weather summer clouds return. They begin to be trim
again, and marshaled, and take up the ordered leisurely sailing of their
pretty squadrons.
April 10.
There is already a general warming and yellowing of twigs. The elm tops
are growing feathery and show a warm brown, and a crimson-coral mist
begins to flush over the low-lying woods, where the swamp maples are in
flower. Pussy-willows are as thick on their twigs as drops after a rain,
and as silvery. You would say at first that nothing had changed yet in
the main forest. The brown aisles and misty dark hollows seem the same,
but no; fringed about the openings and coverts along their borders the
birch and alder catkins are in flower. They are powdery and
gold-colored, and overhead they dangle like the tails of little fairy
sheep against the sky.
The wild geese woke us in the dark, just before dawn, this morning. Last
year there was a violent snow-storm, a perfect smothering whirl of
flakes, the night they flew over, and the great birds were beaten down
among the house-tops, creakling and honkling in dismay and confusion,
but holding on their way.
Now at dusk comes the first silvery evening whistling of the frogs, the
peepers. If a cloud passes over the sun, even as early as three in the
afternoon, they start up as if at a signal, all together, and as the sun
shines out again fall instantly silent.
May 3.
All this time the green has been spreading and spreading through the
pastures till now it clothes them, and the dandelions are scattered over
them like a king's largesse. Dew falls all winter, but it is in star and
fern shapes of frost; now every morning and evening the thick grass is
pearled again with a million nourishing drops.
Now rainbow colors begin to show over the hillsides. It is as if a
thousand and a thousand tiny butterflies, pink and cream color and
living green and crimson, had alighted in the woods. Light comes through
them, and they give back light, from the shining, fine down that covers
them. The little leaves are almost like clear jewels against the sun,
beaded all over the twigs. They only make a slightly dotted veil as yet,
they do not hide or screen. You can see as far into the wood-openings as
in winter. The brown stems and branches are as delicate and distinct as
those of a bed of maiden-hair fern.
The roadside willows are puffs of gold-green smoke, the sapling birches
and quaking aspens like green mounting flames up the hillsides, and the
catkins of the canoe birches shine like the mist of gold sparks from a
rocket.
The different trees develop by different stages, and each stands out in
turn against its fellows, as if illuminated, before it loses itself in
the growing sea of green. You see its full leafy shape, the mass of each
round top, as at no other time of year; yet the individual habit of
branching is still manifest, as in winter: the long springing sprays of
the swamp maples, the more compact strong branches of the oaks, the
maze-like firm twigs of the hop-hornbeams, lying in whorls and layers.
The branchlets of the beeches are like thorns. The elms are soft brown
spirits of trees throughout the woods; their entire fern-like outline is
silhouetted, and the swamp maples stand like delicate living shapes of
bronze.
Innocents are out in patches in the pastures, looking as if white powder
had been spilt. Purple and white hepaticas are clustered in crannies of
the rocks, and after a rain mayflowers stand up thick, thick in the
fields, in masses of pink and white fragrance. Blood-root covers whole
banks with snow-white, and dog-tooth violets, littlest of lilies, nod
their yellow-and-brown prettiness over the slopes carpeted with their
strange mottled leaves.
Shad-bush is out now in fairy white, tasseled over knolls and hillsides
and overhanging wooded banks along the streams. Its opening leaves are
reddish, delicately serrate, and finely downy. The pure white flowers
are loosely starred all over it. They are long-petaled and lightly hung,
and the tree is slender and very pliable, the whole thing suggesting a
delicate raggedness, as if young Spring went lightly on bare feet with
fluttering clothes.
This is the most fairy-scented time of the whole year. "The wood-bine
spices are wafted abroad," indeed. The willows perfume the lanes with
their intoxicating sweetness; and there is a cool pure dawn-like
fragrance everywhere, from the countless millions of opening leaves,
steeped every night with dew.
Last week we saw the first swallows. There they skimmed and flew, as if
they had never gone to other skies at all. Their flight is so
effortless, they seem to pour and stream down unseen cataracts of air.
To-day chimney-swallows came, and we watched their endless rippling and
circling. They sailed and wheeled, in little companies or singly, now
twittering and now silent, and from now on all summer the sky will never
be empty of their beautiful activities.
May 26.
At last the woods are like a garden of delicate flowers, clothing the
hills as far as eye can see with colors of sunrise. The red-oaks are
gold color, with strong brown stems; ash and lindens are golden green;
maples soft copper and bronze, or deep flesh-color.
The flower-like delicacy of leafing out is wonderfully prolonged. The
willows come first, then elms, in brown flower, then quaking-asps and
birches, and then maples. Later, lindens and ash-trees catch the light,
and the ash leaves (which grow far apart, and in bunches, with the
flower-buds) are indeed like just-alighted butterflies. The small leaves
are so bright that even in the rain they shine as if a shaft of sunlight
from some unseen break in the clouds were lighting the woods.
Now long shining leaf buds show among the elm flowers and on the
beeches. The later poplars are cream-white and as downy as velvet. A
wood of maples and poplars is almost a pink-and-white wood; shell-pink,
and palest, most silvery-and-creamy gray.
The tall gold-colored red-oaks make masses of strong color; and later,
when we think the shimmering of the fairy rainbow is fading, the white
oaks come out in a mist of pale carnation--pink and gray and cream.
In June, after all the hardwoods have merged into uniform light green,
firs and spruces become jeweled at every point with tips of light, the
new growth for the year. Red pines and white pines are set all over with
candelabra of lighter green, until high on the tops of the seeding white
pines little clusters of finger-slender pale green cones begin to show.
By this time the forest-flowers have faded through the woods. The
brighter colors of the field-flowers are gay along the roadsides and
over meadows and pastures, and with them Summer has come.