XV

THREE DAYS of warmish spring weather and three days of bottomless mud, and now comes a morning of cold and glaring light with the northwest wind blowing the chimney smoke of the wood fires. The pine branches on the pasture hill roll and sway, the tops of the trees restlessly nodding, and over the dead grass fly last year’s oak leaves in their familiar panic before the invisible streaming of the air.

The wind is neither high nor keen, it is only blustery and comfortably cold. Out of the region of the sky called “the eye of the wind” it comes, and looking thither, I see there a blue clarity and even a cold luminousness as of a window into outer space.

Over the grass, over the roofs and the house, the eddies gather and sweep on, each great sigh trailing behind it a silence which is never a full hush. Only the pond remains in grim quiescence. Still frozen, it lies at the foot of our slopes like an obstinate nugget of winter, the ever-thinning surface changing color with the depth of ice, the vagaries of temperature, and the differing hues of the sky.

The winter’s two-foot floor was no such mirror, and under any sky had an austere look which was all its own. But this ice! Yesterday morning, after a sharp night, the pond emerged from the darkness a new and glassy white, a milk-onyx white, and this it kept till early afternoon when it took on a greyness of mush snow. By evening it had gone steely, darkening to another strange color without any quality or vibration of life.

Obstinate relic of winter, when will it be gone? Not “till the pond is open” will this cold and muddy earth waken to its own life under the already awakened sky. There is a country saying here, and a sound one, that the frost is never fully out of the ground till the ice is out of the pond. When will it go this year? When will it turn that strange blue which is the signal of its disappearance? I have seen the pond open on the twenty-sixth of March—the earliest date anyone can remember—I have seen it stay frozen till April was almost at its end.

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Had I not stopped yesterday to study the pond, to “stand and stare” as Davies says, I would have missed something I hope to have a sight of every spring.

Friends had told me that the geese were going north. My neighbor Elwell Oliver saw a flock go over March fifteenth, a little after midday. Another neighbor whose farm is on a hill heard them last week “hollering” overhead as he went to his barn in the early dark. Because our lakes are frozen, the geese here follow the coast, and settle down for a spell in the open, salt water estuaries and tidal reaches of our great freshwater streams. I have seen them by the hundreds in the coves and sheltered by-waters of the Kennebec and the Penobscot, making themselves at home there well on towards the end of spring.

There is a kind of sixth sense which gives one a nudge now and then, and it was probably that sense which prompted me to look at the sky while I was studying the pond. The geese had come from behind, from the west southwest, and there they were, just overheard, in a sky without a single cloud, in a sky all light and springtime blue. It was a large flock, and the birds were flying rather high in a marked but irregular “V.” I heard no “hollering,” not a note of that lovely, bell-like chorusing which so stirs the heart when a great flock of Canada geese go over in the early night.

Over the pond they went and on towards a ridge lying almost due northeast. I could see them as they cleared it, melting away in the sky above the farms and trees as a faint and wavering line. I looked at my watch; it was a few minutes after four o’clock, and the shadows on the steely lake were themselves turning steely on the ice.

FARM DIARY

Morning sunlight, a cold north wind, vast, vague clouds, snow-flurries, and sunlight again, the whole drama began and ended in twenty minutes. / During the war years some of the hay could not be cut for lack of labor, and people burned over the acreage in the spring. Last night, under a splendor of the Northern Lights, a soldier-farmer who has taken a place on a hilltop burnt over a big field, and strange it was to see all that earthly and rosy glow of fire and rolling smoke under the pale and arctic splendors of the sky. / Redwinged blackbirds have returned to the alder swamp, and I have seen a few grackles. Last year a great flock of grackles pulled up every bit of sweet corn from a neighbor’s kitchen garden. / Mudtime continues, and I hear of people getting stuck on the way to town meeting. By dint of careful driving and sound good judgment, my friend Willard Pinkham who handles our R. F. D. gets to the farm, and glad we are to see him. / Elizabeth, who has just been out for a walk, says that there is a patch of snow to the northwest of the lilac bushes, but that the buds are showing signs of life.

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There is one principle which our world would do well to remember, for it is of first importance whether one sharpens a pencil, builds a house, bakes bread, or lays the intended foundations for Utopia. It is this—that what we make is conditioned by the means we use making it. We may have the best intentions in the world, but if we sharpen our pencils with a dull knife or build a house with a faulty rule, the pencil will be badly sharpened and the house will have an odd little way of opening doors by itself and leaning to one side.

In our barn the larger beams were worked over and squared by someone using what was probably an old-fashioned ship builder’s axe. They are honestly and carefully made, and something of the humanity of the past is in them to this day. Certain other beams have been sawed out, and they are good beams, too, though quite different in look and feeling. The means used in making have marked each kind of beam for all time.

But I do not wish to labor the point. It is enough to say that prophets of expediency who are careless of the means they use and who work outside the human and moral values, have never been able to build anything humanly worth while.