Comes in a spell of weather, snowsqualls, sleet, rain, and snow. But Candlemas Day dawns clear, and John Henry Woodchuck sticks out his snout, sees his shadow, and jumps back abed for another six weeks' snooze. The reachboat in the shed grows, the oak backbone sprouts oak ribs, and the stareyed boy holds against his father as the man drives home the blue bolts in the fragrant red wood. Now is a great business of boring the maples and hanging the sap-pails in the long-shadowed woods. The axe rings on the beech, the echo answers it under the hill, and the cordwood piles up between the fir stakes. Brush fires turn an afternoon warm, and the azure smoke makes the red squirrel cough as he scolds, turning the fir-cone in his expert hands and picking out the winged seeds. The boy burns holes in his breeches his mother will scold much to mend.
Russets and Baldwins are low in the bin, but the strings of dried apples from the open-chamber bring back the taste of summer in a hot pie. The manure pile steams in the sun by the barn. Evenings, the kernels in the wire box over the open stove-cover explode into hot snowballs, the woman of the house pours on molasses and melted butter, and makes the balls which will keep the mouths of boys and girls busy till bedtime. The school children read about log cabins and Lincoln. The farmer cuts transparent chunks from the folios of salted hake and eats them with his hot meal porridge. Now the scissors flash, and the girls, with their tongues following the curving of the scissors, turn out lattices of hearts from white and red paper; the little boy goes with his heart in his mouth and pushes his misspelled missive, garnished with a vast beefheart, under the door of the small girl with molasses-candy curls.
Sweethart I am thyne
Wunt you be my Vallantine.
The ocean chafes out beyond the white ice, and the long white fires of its spray burn along the horizon. The yoked oxen drag the pine logs for next year's dory from the swamp, and there is much yelling of whoa-bis! gee-haw! and using of the goad on the off-ox. The big boy sharpens the axe and spits out the corner of his mouth like a man; he leaves a yellow star on the snow. Two feet of snow fall. The bees keep the hive warm with their winnowing wings. The Father of our Country is wreathed in red-white-and-blue crêpe paper in the steel engraving on the east wall of the school. A freckled boy with beanpot handles for ears says farewell to his officers and brothers in Cincinnati who have founded a nation out of shopkeepers, plowmen, and lawyers. It snows. It snows. It snows.
The rabbit in the swamp eats the top buds off the alders. Grandma sees the new moon over her left shoulder and trembles. She breaks the steel bows on her spectacles next day. The whitening buds on the waxy arbutus are four feet under the white level of the world. The only fresh fish are small smelts, but the women piecen them out with red Kennebec turkeys from the long sticks in the smokehouse; they pinch the herrings' tails under the stove-cover, let them hang down to the coals, pull them out all ablaze; and the smell of herring scents up the whole house. The men fall to with watering mouths and eat their fiery supper.
Pisces is the sign, and though the fresh cod are idling deep in Atlantic, salt cod with pork gravy saffrons the noon.
The lantern lights the tie-up windows in the dead of the night, and there is a wobbly-legged calf for the young boy to hug in the morning. All the girls get new dresses, and the sewing machine sings beyond the rising of the evening star. The boys get new breeches cut out of father's pants. The young man slicks down his hair for the Grange Sociable, he bids for the basket of the girl with tight braids and eats her pound-cake with her, his heart beating fast and his head as light as a feather.
Now men look to their lobster traps in the fishhouse, the wormed laths are replaced with new, and the triple bows of spruce are renailed. The winds box the compass. But the strongest and longest are swinging more towards the south. Grandpa sits on the Youth's Companion to keep it from the small boy. The hens cackle loud with reddened combs in the melting snow at noon, the rooster treads on his wing to them, he struts on only the tips of his toes, barely touching the ground. The baskets come heaping full of warm eggs now, when the sun slips down behind the western pines and the snow hardens to ivory.
The dish of the month is halibuts' heads. The small boy brings three of the wide-mouthed heads from the frosty barrel in the shed. The women gouge out the eyes and soak the heads in warm water and scrape them. They put them into the greased bake-pan and lace with powdered herbs and ribbons of salt pork, they pop them into the oven, with a red-oak-wood fire going full blast, and sit back and relax and let the odors of the delectable compromise of fat and lean meat in the halibuts' heads fill the kitchen, fill the house, fill the woods beyond. And the men and boys come running home to dinner and crunch the crisp, brown, crackling meat, and even the bones, to get the last goodness out of the good deep-sea flesh. And they eat so much that they cannot return to the wood-chopping.
It is a cold month, a snowy month, and the ocean is locked up tight. But days are lengthening out, the sap is flowing up in men and maples. The world is a promise of growing.
Pinterest
