XVII

THE FARM landscape remains winterish and rather grim though today’s south wind has a real warmth in it, and the pond is now free of ice. A remnant of the ice, I note, is still visible this morning lying crumpled upon itself along the opposite shore. Now that the pond is open, however, and the expanse of bright blue water twinkles in the sunshine of a bright blue day, none of us feels that spring can be far behind.

Wondering what the pond edge would have to show a day after the vernal clearing, I went walking yesterday afternoon along our own west shore, making a rather muddy pilgrimage down the sodden fields to the tumbled and stony margin of my land. Though the pond has its sandy beaches we are not fortunate enough to possess one, and our shore is the usual glacial conglomeration and disorder of stones and small boulders sloping down from the turf into the three and four feet of water just off-shore.

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The water was high, the wavelets tumbling in over the drowned stones to strike the higher rocks and the sod of the field, and the miniature waves, as they hastened shorewards, were as diamond clear as the waters of a spring. What touches the heart most deeply, perhaps, was the new sense of freedom and motion which had come into being in a world which only two days ago had been sealed up in a steely-blackish prison of rotten ice. Now all this aspect of nature was alive again, the small freshwater waves rolling in upon their chaos of cold, greyish stones and flinging up as they struck heavy, rounded, crystal-clear drops of living water. The air was full of small plashing noises and watery chuckles whose pleasant and incessant chatter rose from the rock-marge to form a kind of obligato to the sound of a light southwest wind in the porches of the ears. Looking directly down into the water, I could see that the sunlight passing through the moving wavelets made dissolving patterns of light on the submerged stones, the light itself moving shoreward in tiny gleams and speckles of watery sunshine which had their instant of being and then were gone.

I could see no fish but it came to my mind that our local fishermen would all be anxious to try their luck now that the ice was out. They like to bring home one of the small salmon with which the state stocked these waters some years ago, though the pond is really famous for its native, small-mouthed bass. Such a fish, caught and dressed in the evening, the steel knives busy above a newspaper in the kitchen sink, certainly makes a wonderful farm breakfast! I have often had young bass swim around my toes when I myself went swimming, but this time the clear water was empty of life of any kind.

Trudging homeward to the red farm above the slope, I noticed something which gave me a real sense of seasonal hope. The clouds moving northerly on the unusually warm south wind had for the first time this year a summer look and a summer character. The earth below, it is true, remained rather winterish and pale, but above the pines, in the day’s mild sky, summer itself went sailing past. Later in the afternoon, as if to fill in the picture, a robin gave us a first song—well, not a song, perhaps, but a cheerful and musical warble, and this was the first bird music I had chanced to hear.

FARM DIARY

The warm day closes with a thunderstorm to the “suth’ard,” the lightning being unusually yellow in color, and making a yellow flare behind the wintry trees. / At supper, Elizabeth says that she hopes I will be sure to order seed for a row of sunflowers. She prefers the familiar, old-fashioned kind to the new decorative hybrids. / First loons calling from the pond, the wild, beautiful, ululating cry rising from somewhere in the dark of the open waters. / New growth in last year’s ploughed land already a faint, rather pale green. / The birds begin to arrive, tree swallows on April ninth, fox sparrows on the tenth, and a first marsh hawk appears on the eleventh and hunts the fields through a light fall of snow. / Ellis Simmons, who lived with us here two years, returns to give me a day’s work, and we have a fine out o’door session cleaning up after winter, and thinning out a copse of saplings near the pond. / More bronze grackles, a thoroughly unpopular bird in the farm country. Nobody here has a good word to say for them. / The coal fire made the house so uncomfortably hot on the warm day that I am letting it go out and changing over to wood. / Quiet and solitary evening, and I spend a pleasant half hour in the kitchen rocking chair going through nursery catalogues to see if some eastern grower offers the Haralson apple. I hear good things of it from friends in the west.

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There are times when I wish that the word “hero” might again claim the honor once its due. In our age it has become so vulgarized and cheapened that the meaning has gone out of it. In the classical past, it seems to have been applied to those figures of mythology and shadowy history who, being men in semblance and living in a human world, contrived somehow to be more than men; doers of adventurous deeds “on the side of life” like Hercules and Perseus or Hector of the walls of Troy. What can be done to rescue so honorable a word from the street?

For my own part, whenever I think of the word “hero,” I think of those United States Army privates who more than a generation ago allowed themselves to be used as “human guinea pigs,” in establishing the mosquito theory of the cause of that foul and malignant disease, yellow fever. That act was heroism in the great sense of a great word, and these men were “heroes” if man has ever produced heroes. It is good to remember that a group of rather humble young Americans made this superb gesture.