The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers Part 5

XII

THE COMING OF SUMMER

Who shall say when one season ends and another begins? Only the almanac-makers can fix these dates. It is like saying when babyhood ends and childhood begins, or when childhood ends and youth begins. To me spring begins when the catkins on the alders and the p.u.s.s.y-willows begin to swell; when the ice breaks up on the river and the first sea-gulls come prospecting northward.

Whatever the date--the first or the middle or the last of March--when these signs appear, then I know spring is at hand.

Her first birds--the bluebird, the song sparrow, the robin, the red-shouldered starling--are here or soon will be. The crows have a more confident caw, the sap begins to start in the sugar maple, the tiny boom of the first bee is heard, the downy woodp.e.c.k.e.r begins his resonant tat, tat, tat, on the dry limbs, and the cattle in the barnyard low long and loud with wistful looks toward the fields.

The first hint of summer comes when the trees are fully fledged and the nymph Shadow is born. See her cool circles again beneath the trees in the field, or her deeper and cooler retreats in the woods. On the slopes, on the opposite side of the river, there have been for months under the morning and noon sun only slight shadow tracings, a fretwork of shadow lines; but some morning in May I look across and see solid ma.s.ses of shade falling from the trees athwart the sloping turf. How the eye revels in them! The trees are again clothed and in their right minds; myriad leaves rustle in promise of the coming festival. Now the trees are sentient beings; they have thoughts and fancies; they stir with emotion; they converse together; they whisper or dream in the twilight; they struggle and wrestle with the storm.

"Caught and cuff'd by the gale,"

Tennyson says.

Summer always comes in the person of June, with a bunch of daisies on her breast and clover blossoms in her hands. A new chapter in the season is opened when these flowers appear. One says to himself, "Well, I have lived to see the daisies again and to smell the red clover." One plucks the first blossoms tenderly and caressingly. What memories are stirred in the mind by the fragrance of the one and the youthful face of the other! There is nothing else like that smell of the clover: it is the maidenly breath of summer; it suggests all fresh, buxom, rural things. A field of ruddy, blooming clover, dashed or sprinkled here and there with the snow-white of the daisies; its breath drifts into the road when you are pa.s.sing; you hear the boom of bees, the voice of bobolinks, the twitter of swallows, the whistle of woodchucks; you smell wild strawberries; you see the cattle upon the hills; you see your youth, the youth of a happy farm-boy, rise before you. In Kentucky I once saw two fields, of one hundred acres each, all ruddy with blooming clover--perfume for a whole county.

The blooming orchards are the glory of May, the blooming clover-fields the distinction of June. Other characteristic June perfumes come from the honey-locusts and the blooming grapevines.

At times and in certain localities the air at night and morning is heavy with the breath of the former, and along the lanes and roadsides we inhale the delicate fragrance of the wild grape. The early gra.s.ses, too, with their frostlike bloom, contribute something very welcome to the breath of June.

Nearly every season I note what I call the bridal day of summer--a white, lucid, s.h.i.+ning day, with a delicate veil of mist softening all outlines. How the river dances and sparkles; how the new leaves of all the trees s.h.i.+ne under the sun; the air has a soft l.u.s.tre; there is a haze, it is not blue, but a kind of s.h.i.+ning, diffused nimbus. No clouds, the sky a bluish white, very soft and delicate. It is the nuptial day of the season; the sun fairly takes the earth to be his own, for better or for worse, on such a day, and what marriages there are going on all about us: the marriages of the flowers, of the bees, of the birds.

Everything suggests life, love, fruition. These bridal days are often repeated; the serenity and equipoise of the elements combine. They were such days as these that the poet Lowell had in mind when he exclaimed, "What is so rare as a day in June?" Here is the record of such a day, June 1, 1883: "Day perfect in temper, in mood, in everything. Foliage all out except on b.u.t.ton-b.a.l.l.s and celtis, and putting on its dark green summer color, solid shadows under the trees, and stretching down the slopes. A few indolent summer clouds here and there. A day of gently rustling and curtsying leaves, when the breeze almost seems to blow upward. The fields of full-grown, nodding rye slowly stir and sway like vast a.s.semblages of people. How the chimney swallows chipper as they sweep past! The vireo's cheerful warble echoes in the leafy maples; the branches of the Norway spruce and the hemlocks have gotten themselves new light green tips; the dandelion's spheres of ethereal down rise above the gra.s.s: and now and then one of them suddenly goes down: the little chippy, or social sparrow, has thrown itself upon the frail stalk and brought it to the ground, to feed upon its seeds; here it gets the first fruits of the season. The first red and white clover heads have just opened, the yellow rock-rose and the sweet viburnum are in bloom; the bird chorus is still full and animated; the keys of the red maple strew the ground, and the cotton of the early everlasting drifts upon the air."

For several days there was but little change. "Getting toward the high tide of summer. The air well warmed up, Nature in her jocund mood, still, all leaf and sap. The days are idyllic. I lie on my back on the gra.s.s in the shade of the house, and look up to the soft, slowly moving clouds, and to the chimney swallows disporting themselves up there in the breezy depths. No hardening in vegetation yet. The moist, hot, fragrant breath of the fields--mingled odor of blossoming gra.s.ses, clover, daisies, rye--the locust blossoms, dropping. What a humming about the hives; what freshness in the shade of every tree; what contentment in the flocks and herds! The springs are yet full and cold; the shaded watercourses and pond margins begin to draw one." Go to the top of the hill on such a morning, say by nine o'clock, and see how unspeakably fresh and full the world looks. The morning shadows yet linger everywhere, even in the suns.h.i.+ne; a kind of blue coolness and freshness, the vapor of dew tinting the air.

Heat and moisture, the father and mother of all that lives, when June has plenty of these, the increase is sure.

Early in June the rye and wheat heads begin to nod; the motionless stalks have a reflective, meditative air. A little while ago, when their heads were empty or filled only with chaff and sap, how straight up they held them! Now that the grain is forming, they have a sober, thoughtful look. It is one of the most pleasing spectacles of June, a field of rye gently shaken by the wind. How the breezes are defined upon its surface--a surface as sensitive as that of water; how they trip along, little breezes and big breezes together! Just as this glaucous green surface of the rye-field bends beneath the light tread of the winds, so, we are told, the crust of the earth itself bends beneath the giant strides of the great atmospheric waves.

There is one bird I seldom hear till June, and that is the cuckoo. Sometimes the last days of May bring him, but oftener it is June before I hear his note. The cuckoo is the true recluse among our birds. I doubt if there is any joy in his soul.

"Rain-crow," he is called in some parts of the country. His call is supposed to bode rain. Why do other birds, the robin for instance, often make war upon the cuckoo, chasing it from the vicinity of their nests? There seems to be something about the cuckoo that makes its position among the birds rather anomalous.

Is it at times a parasitical bird, dropping its eggs into other birds' nests? Or is there some suggestion of the hawk about our species as well as about the European? I do not know. I only know that it seems to be regarded with a suspicious eye by other birds, and that it wanders about at night in a way that no respectable bird should. The birds that come in March, as the bluebird, the robin, the song sparrow, the starling, build in April; the April birds, such as the brown thrasher, the barn swallow, the chewink, the water-thrush, the oven-bird, the chippy, the high-hole, the meadowlark, build in May, while the May birds, the kingbird, the wood thrush, the oriole, the orchard starling, and the warblers, build in June. The April nests are exposed to the most dangers: the storms, the crows, the squirrels, are all liable to cut them off. The midsummer nests, like that of the goldfinch and the waxwing, or cedar-bird, are the safest of all.

In March the door of the seasons first stands ajar a little; in April it is opened much wider; in May the windows go up also; and in June the walls are fairly taken down and the genial currents have free play everywhere. The event of March in the country is the first good sap day, when the maples thrill with the kindling warmth; the event of April is the new furrow and the first seeding;--how ruddy and warm the soil looks just opened to the sun!--the event of May is the week of orchard bloom; with what sweet, pensive gladness one walks beneath the pink-white ma.s.ses, while long, long thoughts descend upon him! See the impetuous orioles chase one another amid the branches, shaking down the fragrant snow. Here the rose-breasted grosbeak is in the blooming cherry tree, snipping off the blossoms with that heavy beak of his--a spot of crimson and black half hidden in ma.s.ses of white petals. This orchard bloom travels like a wave. In March it is in the Carolinas; by the middle of April its crest has reached the Potomac; a week or ten days later it is in New Jersey; then in May it sweeps through New York and New England; and early in June it is breaking upon the orchards in Canada. Finally, the event of June is the fields ruddy with clover and milk-white with daisies.