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HIGHER, higher climbs the radiant noonday sun, the shadows grow shorter beneath the trees, snow slides from the roof, and the shingles steam. March is a beautiful month in the north for now the battle is won, and we of the country world can take new storms and returning snows with an easier heart; they will soon be gone.

The very expression on our country faces has changed; we are released and expectant. Icicles meet and run, and gather to a fall of rainbow drops which make an incessant and crystal sound of tiny waters. A kind of seasonal pang shakes the whole earth.

All morning long, as I have worked in the sun with comfortable bare hands, a huge March wind has been rushing over the earth. It is a westerly wind rather than a northwester, but it might have come from any quarter of the compass. It has no name, this torrent of the air, it is but the wind. These March winds, I am told, mark something different in the calendar of the year, for they arise between an equator at its greatest heat and a polar region at its fiercest cold. They seem to me a little higher above the earth than the winds of early winter, for sometimes little stirs below on the winterish and thinly-muddy ground whilst the tops of the trees turn aside and cry out with a new cry in the great and day-long roaring.

The drifts have gone. The dead, brown wires of old spears of grass first pierced the vanishing snow, then widening tussocks rose, and last of all bare hilltops and southern slopes emerging. As the snow vanishes, the simplicity of the landscape disappears, and the eye wanders over a land spread out in springtime variegations of uncovered brown and ever-retreating white.

Walking this morning above the hay field, I noticed how residual snow still recorded last summer and its works, for the wheeltracks of the haycart were still traced in vestiges of snow, and there were lines of white in the ploughed land on the slope. Only the frozen pond gives no apparent sign of change and further change to come. It might be frozen forever into its frozen bays.

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A few crows have returned: they visit us when the open earth appears. As my old friend and neighbor Mrs. Agnes Rollins said with a twinkle in her eye, “To think we’d ever be glad to see a crow!” A robin has been seen nearer the saltwater country, but so far there has been no sign of the wild geese.

All over the countryside there is a rush to finish winter chores. Cordwood must be got out on some last snow, and if needs be, some final layer of ice cut to fill the ice house to the top.

Of the four ancient and poetic symbols which haunted the imagination of the Scriptural East, the Eagle, the Lion, the Angel, and the Ox, the Eagle stood as the symbol of the East, the Morning, and the Spring. In this moment of blue sky and roaring wind, the wisdom of the poetry is borne in upon me, for it is the Eagle who is summoning and awakening the Morning and the Spring, his wings outstretched to the sun reborn and his talons gripped to the rock with ice on its shadowed side.

FARM DIARY

My woodshed beginning to look somewhat depleted, Lawrence Simmons comes to help me rebuild the stacks with wood stored under cover. Bulldozing a snowdrift with his truck, he fills up with a fine load, and soon we are both busy in the shed, the sliding door open to the western light. / Sad news of a returning veteran as related by a neighbor, “Yes, he’s home but he’s changed. Awfully changed. Why, he talks like a New Yorker.” / The young women are great hands here for giving each other surprise birthday parties. As older friends we have just fallen heir to two pieces of birthday cake put aside for us in a wrapping of oiled paper. Elizabeth says that it is pink cake this time made with the syrup of preserved wild strawberries, and that it looks particularly good.

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No age in history can afford to lay too much emphasis upon “security.” The truth is that from our first breath to our last we inhabit insecurely a world which must of its transitory nature be insecure, and that moreover any security we do achieve is but a kind of an illusion. While admitting that a profound instinct towards such safety as we can achieve is part of our animal being, let us also confess that the challenge involved in mere existence is the source of many of the greater virtues of human character.