XVI

ALL DAY long the whole neighborhood has been watching the ice go out. For about a week now, it has been getting ready to go, its pools of open water lengthening to the south of islands and southward-facing promontories. The open bay which has been in existence for a fortnight by the old mill to the south has been clearly growing larger, the dark pond water surfaced with sunshine and the reflected blue of the spring sky.

Everything would now depend on a turn of the wind, said the farmers. On “the neck” we share a common store of knowledge about the pond; we know when it has been high and when it has been low, and there are some among us who can recall what more than eighty springs have done to the ice. This year it looked like an early clearing. Four days of warm, even of hot weather had been at work on that worn, rain-colored flatness now turned rain-color and blue. This morning the northwest wind carried the day.

From farm windows looking down to the opening waters over kitchen sinks, from clotheslines where the northwest wind billowed the farm shirts, the overalls, and the underwear, the women took time to glance thoughtfully down. All the men, too, were watching the familiar scene from a corner of their eye, pausing as they went across high ground to study the look of the pond and the enlarging pools. The great floor of winter was breaking up.

The open water by the islands and the promontories had spread, cracks and channels had appeared, and detached floes were slowly, very slowly drifting southerly. Larger islands of ice were breaking from the northerly mass and floating off into the southern reaches of the pond, which thus opened northward against the warm and pleasant wind. Yet far to the north I could see a floor of ice apparently only just beginning to feel the power of the wind and the hot sun.

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By three o’clock in the afternoon, our region of the pond had entirely cleared. True, there was still ice on the shore, frozen even under a hot sun to the rocks and gravels it had overlain all winter long, and the west wind had blown some ice into shallow coves on the southeast side, but all else was the blue and living water of the living and awakened year. Three or four small ice cakes twinkling in the afternoon light only heightened the sense of summer by their dramatic contrast with the genial temper of the day.

In a few hours, the landscape had turned one of the great corners of the year. It was a different world, now, a world out of chains, and for the first time one could see in Nature that caprice of liberated motion which is the seal of summer and its rich and wayward being.

Moods and fantasies of earth, unseen for almost six months, had come with magical swiftness into their renewed and seasonal existence. Once more the dark wind rushed before me down the slope and out on the open water, once more the catspaws of wind formed twinkling on the surface of the cove, lingered their strange moment and were gone. A whole new pattern of light and wonder has become a part of life. There was something else; what was it? Suddenly I had the answer: it was the smell of fresh water, the pond smell, touching a familiar chord of country memory.

FARM DIARY

On the way to Linwood Palmer’s grocery, I note a neighbor planting peas. The well-drained, hilltop land looked about ready, and the soil had been well prepared. / Tomato seedlings are now a part of every farm kitchen, standing in the window “which gets the most sun.” The “Marglobe” tomato is rather a favorite of mine. / A friend tells me that European governments are sending men over here to study contour farming. / An old farm which was bought recently after having been untenanted for years has been burned flat. My friend, John Buchan, who was to repair the chimney, now wonders what is the proper thing to do about the key? He had it from the new owner, and it was a mishap of the new owner which started the fire. / The seacoast being clear of ice and the coastal roads free at last of mudtime, we have our first visitors from saltwater. Out of an aged coupe step two men dressed not like farmers but like fishermen and wearing folded-down rubber boots. A father and a grown son, both lean, salty, and blue-eyed. We buy some fine clams, and I promise a chowder for supper. The men are often the chowder makers here. My friend and fellow Grange member Jack Burns made the Grange a wonderful clam chowder for installation night. / Elizabeth, who likes lilies, wants me to put in some hardy types here and there by the stone walls.

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On a dark and none too warm evening, the alder swamp rings with the triumphant chorus of a whole nation of spring peepers. The living, exultant noise sounds like a frenzy of tiny sleighbells, and through it one hears the musical trilling of the common toad, and the occasional jug-o-rum of a bull frog. Heard nearby, the din from the swamp is almost deafening. It is a Dionysian ecstasy of night and spring, a shouting and a rejoicing out of puddles and streams, a festival of belief in sheer animal existence.

What has come over man that he has so lost this animal faith? If he wishes to stay alive as a creature of earth, it is to this faith that he must cling at all possible cost, for let him once relax his hold, out of his own being will emerge that brood of pessimisms and despairs which will bend back his fingers till they have broken his hold on life, and with it his vital and primitive strength. The body is not all of us, though a metaphorical animal carries us all upon its back, and even as the body keeps its own mysterious wills—even such as that of the heart to beat—so must it have its own appropriate and earthly faith. It was a fine music from the marsh, and in these our times I wish that all the world had been there to hear.