Sunday, May 16th

ANOTHER OF THESE silken days … I am in an ecstasy of birds and their plummeting flight past the terrace. It is very thrilling when a bird closes its wings and shoots along like a torpedo through the air. The elusive oriole is everywhere now, in and out of maple flowers and apple blossom. But I rarely catch sight of him. I miss the white-throated sparrow … has he not returned? The mourning doves settle under the bird feeder, half a dozen at a time, and when disturbed make a lovely rustling whirr as they fly off. But it is now no single bird but the sense of congregations everywhere in the air and in the trees that makes the thrill. Out in the field the killdeer give their sharp peep, and the tree swallows go scooting around in the evening. The air they inhabit with such grace is intoxicating in itself, cool and gentle. What days!

Now the lilacs are coming out and the fruit trees almost over; there are still patches of glowing white and yellow narcissus in the field, but they are almost gone. It all comes and goes so fast, like a dream.

Yesterday the four children from the Gates school in Acton and two of their teachers came for a picnic. They are eight now, and have written me and sent delightful presents since they were six and read Punch, so we are old friends. It all turned out beautifully. They rushed down to the rocky beach, took off their sneakers and were soon immersed in all that ocean maze of “finds”—smooth rocks, banded or not, mussel shells, living snails (great excitement at that). Tamas doesn’t see many people only a little taller than he and I was afraid he might feel nervous, but within a few minutes he was quite himself and looking for a hand or bare foot to lick. Bramble made a brief appearance when we did the walk through the woods, came toward me, saw what a crowd stood behind me, and fled. We didn’t see her again!

The children noticed everything; Chris even spotted a lady’s slipper (still green) I had not seen. They loved the violets—carpets of them now in the open field. Maura made a turtle out of two stones and two little pieces of driftwood (for paws), and it all ended with some Polaroid pictures of us with Tamas. Such a good day!

I feel the school must be quite exceptional, as these children were so free and yet so well-behaved, so full of things they wanted to do, alone and together, so independent yet responsive.

While I was waiting for them to come I opened and then became immersed in a new book, The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier. It seems incredible that in that whole winter I spent in Paris, when I walked the Rue de L’Odéon a thousand times, I never entered either her bookshop “La Maison des Amis des Livres” or Sylvia Beach’s “Shakespeare and Co.” across the street from it. I would have felt at home in both, and those two lovers of literature would have taught me a great many things I needed to know then, and even now am ignorant of. This book has as its frontispiece Adrienne Monnier’s description of The Very Rich Hours of the Duc de Berry. I read it, thinking how much this moment in York resembles one of them:

“Before The Very Rich Hours of the Duc de Berry I seemed to perceive as through a magic emerald the very nature of France: our land and its people dressed in bold colors; gestures of work as pure as those of the Mass; women in flowerlike dresses; fanfares of leisure; living water, branches; desires and loves; beautiful castles in the distance; a comforting sky; our animals near us; our days colored with hope and finely woven.

“It is not without reason that the stroke of strong admiration brings tears to the eyes. The sight or sound of perfect things causes a certain suffering. In the case of these miniatures, is it not as if one were burned by a fine rain of fire? Such works are like the focus of a lens that gathers the light of all space into one intense point. With a passionate concentration they draw from the world of forms a kind of jewel, a fairy-thing.”

Every word of this reverberates for me. I can ponder it phrase by phrase—the contrast, for instance, between “desires and loves.”