XXIV

IT IS summer at last, and the world is alive again in the warm and pleasant air. Tree leaves are not yet fully out, but branches are again clothed in green, and once again do shadows of summer move with swaying bough and twig across the rustic unevenness of the farmhouse lawn. Within the earth, upon it, and above it, life stirs and would go on. All day long our flowering apples hum with the sound of honey bees, and late into the dusk one huge bumble bee prolongs the drowsy murmur, working at the top of the tree where the flowers catch the very last of the evening light.

Perhaps in all our country scene, nothing seems more eager and living than the birds. Because this is old forest country only here and there opened into farms, we have a rather large variety of species. Among them are birds of the northern woods, birds of the farm country, birds who like pond shores, water birds, and even strays from the neighboring Atlantic. You never can tell what you may see. Two years ago, for instance, that fantastic creature, the northern pileated woodpecker flew out of the woods and rested for awhile on the ridge pole of our disused icehouse, and only last fall, going down to the fields after a wild northeaster, I startled up a red-legged guillemot from between the blown, dishevelled rows of corn. It was a strange sight to see that ocean creature flying through inland Maine.

Certain birds we can count on as familiars. Robins are our songsters, cheerfully loquacious and musically talkative from the nearer trees, sociable heralds of the early light, and builders of nests in absurd places. Last year a robin who would have had difficulties with an intelligence test, built a nest under the big tank on a beam exposed to the deluges of the frequent overflows. The farm wondered if she planned to raise ducks! Chimney swifts have built in the chimney of my bedroom, and sometimes wake me in the early morning with the muffled and hollow roaring of their wings as they flutter up from their cavern of night and soot into the air of dawn.

The usual yellow warblers are at home in a sheltered apple tree whose branches shade the house, the usual catbirds are in their chokecherry thicket, and the tree swallows have again taken over the bird house which needs a coat of paint. The barn swallows, too, have come, and for the time being are hunting the air above and about the house, on tireless wings darting and glancing high above the old apple tree in flower, the red water tank, and the two tall, austere chimneys of the ell. In the quiet evenings after sundown we hear the thrushes calling from the woods.

If these are the familiars of the house, the hilltop, and the barn, the bobolink is the very spirit of the fields. These slopes rolling down to the pond are a bobolink paradise, and all summer long we live in sight and sound of them, the fields housing perhaps a dozen or even twenty pairs. The male birds arrive in the middle of May, and the females follow soon after. As my old friend Edward Forbush once wrote, “The bobolink is the harlequin of the fields, and he wears his suit wrong-side up.” Again and again here, I have watched him pursue his mate, singing as he goes, the bubbling song and the purposeful, determined flight joined together in one exultant surge of living. Nests are built on the ground and are hidden with particular skill in tangles at the foot of bushy weeds and near clumps of taller grass.

The eggs once laid, the female takes charge of housekeeping, leaving the male free to celebrate his song while keeping a weather eye on the nest in case of trouble. June is our bobolink month, and it is the feast of song we are now hearing. From branches of nearby trees, from fence posts, from some swaying weed top, from the living air, the bobolink song pours downward through space like the sound of some musical waterfall. Sometimes when I am working in the kitchen garden, I lay down my trowel just to listen a while.

FARM DIARY

First bouquet of flowers on the breakfast table, a nosegay of English cowslips from the garden Elizabeth allows to run wild. This European cowslip—Primula Officinalis or Veris—does well with us, making nothing of our long winters, and welcoming the spring every year with its cheerful yellow flowers. / First summer thunderstorm of the year, and a sound of thunder in the night together with a murmur of rain and a few flares of lightning in the west. Soon over, and the house stops listening, and goes back to sleep. / The ploughing of the fields continues, and we watch Major and Prince walking to and fro, to and fro, over last year’s earth, tracing furrows whose regular contour reminds me of the roll of mid-ocean waves in a light air. / Wild strawberries in bloom, the small white flowers scattered like stars in the short grass.

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Under today’s disorders there is something at work among the nations whose great importance has not yet been adequately realized—the need of men for a community to live in and live with. The hope is vague, unsaid, and unformulated, but the need is great, and there is something in our hearts which troubles us that we have lost what was once so beautifully called “the commonweal.”

I suspect that if this open wound is to heal, it will have to heal like all wounds from the bottom, and that we shall have to begin at the beginning with the family and its obligations, with the village and its responsibilities, and with our universal and neglected duty to the earth.