XIV

SODDEN and cold, the liberated earth rises from the long sleep and imprisonment of winter, her fields a yellowish pallor of water-soaked and matted grass, her roads a noonday glisten of mire and ruts of heavy mud. March with its snows and light and warmer temperatures can be one of the loveliest months of the year, but alas for early April and the long fortnight immemorially known as “mudtime.” It is then that the “bottom falls out of the roads,” as the local phrase has it, that cars get stuck and people try to pry them out with old boards and stones, and that paths of mud form on the linoleums which no scraping of feet at a doorstep can ever hope to cure.

“Mudtime” it is, mudtime up to our necks, and we shall all be bogged down, slowed down, be mud-booted and mud-breeched till the earth has yielded up its deeper frosts and dried in the mildly warm winds and the increasingly pleasant sun. The milk truck, however, seems to be managing it somehow, and I see cars lurch through with unexpected slides into mud soup and deep ruts which seize upon the tires and wiggle the steering wheel. When we meet, our ironic and universal phrase is this: “Nice weather overhead.”

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It is spring, and it is also the north, and we keep our fingers crossed while the season makes up its mind. Back and forth, between winter and summer, it goes, turning to winter and a sort of warm December with a cloud shadow and a searching wind, and then smiling back less to spring than to a promise of spring. We all rather grimly remember last year’s blizzard on May eleventh, the wet, heavy snow on the apple orchards in blossom, and the consequent loss of almost the entire apple crop. But the farm house door stands open awhile towards the air and sun and a few flies have appeared who look as if they needed kind words and vitamins.

After a hard winter, this northern land is a kind of deserted battlefield. Seemingly lifeless itself and still cold, it shows on every side the wreckage of the long struggle and the obstinate withdrawal, the dead leaves decaying to rot and nothingness in the lifeless grass and the scattered twigs and branchlets becoming a part of the hungry life of nature and the soil.

The great winds of spring are both a paean of victory and something of a farewell. Winter is gone and good riddance; it is indeed time for something else, yet even as I set down these words I remember the walk at night down into the woods after the great storm, the moonlight and the shadows in the clearings, the silence beyond all silences, and the evergreens laden and garlanded with snow.

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Mudtime. Not much one can do outside the usual spring schedule of small jobs, repairs, plans, measurements, cogitations, and tinkerings. I’d like to be able to get down the farm bell, give it a sanding over, and then a new coat of gilt, but will have to wait till Lawrence comes to bear a hand.

The ice on the pond will certainly go within the next week. The path of open water about the central mass has appreciably widened, and lies there placid and rather dark; the residual ice itself darkening as the deep water beneath begins to show through. Robins and crows seem to be about our only birds. Crows are returning every day in greater numbers, and this morning I saw five walking about on the wet sod of the west field beyond the road.

Elizabeth says that a seagull came over earlier in the day, flying low over the woods, and bore south over the pond to a cove hidden in the pines. Seagulls do not visit us in winter, and this is the first seafarer of the ploughman’s year.

FARM DIARY

This is not a sugar-bush country, but we do have sugar maples, and here and there a farmer is trying to make a few quarts of syrup for family use. All kinds of make-do containers hang from the trees, such as lard pails, preserve jars, and even milk bottles rigged with a wire. This small scale syrup which is boiled down on the kitchen stove is usually pretty good, for it keeps something of the wild tang—not too confoundedly pure. / No more frost on the panes and I can now see the outdoor world when I get things going in the morning. When every window is opaque with frost, the house is a kind of sealed fortress, and oneself a kind of prisoner. / Spring call of the blue jays very frequent now; sounds like a note blown from an old-fashioned “organ whistle” made of seasoned wood. / My friend “Chad” Richards of Camden tells me that on a pond to the north he followed an otter track for miles on a surface of light snow, the track very distinct, and “one foot bled a little.” The creature made a great circle like a fox and deliberately went through every “wet, slushy puddle” on the ice.

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Whenever I visit a farm where there are little children below school age, I am always interested to see how naturally and easily the farm leads them on into its own pattern of farm and family life. On a farm, the day’s work is the most exciting and interesting thing that goes on, and farm children are instinctively aware of it, deserting their toys on the instant to rush out and see Buttercup’s new calf. The boys start imitating farm work early and may want to feed the stock before they can scarce walk, the little girls very quickly come to a knowledge of their own power and their own skills. Imperceptibly and sometimes very fast, the “help” ceases to be play, and the first thing you know you have a farmer.

I know well enough that it does not always work this way, and that the farm can produce a rebel and a hard case as well as any environment. But the principle is the right one, and the road an honest and human path. There is something very fine in family labor shared together in goodwill by all the generations under a roof. It holds the household together in a bond of life and a unity of purpose, it gives a human core of strength, and it builds up a family against time and loneliness.

One morning last October when I was splitting wood by the barn, a boy of five whose uncle was working with us that day came over to me and very quietly and without a word began to sort out billets of the size I was splitting and lay them by my hand. He stood by and helped me as long as I worked there, neither of us breaking a polite reticence, but both of us entirely at ease, companionable, and content. His people were not rich in the world’s goods, but he was already a little friendly human being prepared to do his share and glad to be doing it. I shall never forget the grave friendliness and quiet goodwill of that small child.