Winds are out of the north, out of the east, then out of the south; the vane is wearing loose on its ferrule. The cows are restless at their stanchions; the mows are low enough for a boy to leap off them, the hay is half chaff. The big boy goes into long pants and begins to walk like his father. The children toe the mark and line up for their sulphur-and-molasses. The mother makes camphor bags for their necks against colds. It snows, it blows, it rains, it sleets, it blows, it snows again. It is clear as crystal, and a thousand summer clouds run by without getting in the sun's way.
A mother hen sits on a checkerboard of sunlight in the shed, and twenty-two new eyes as bright as blueberries gaze out from under the feathers on her widened wings. The broom falls across the door, and the old man swears it means a stranger is coming. It turns out true. The old cradle has a new tenant, and his eyes are flakes of the sudden blue between March clouds.
A son that's born in shiny March is full of iron, stars, and starch.
The winds blow up into a peak and a gale. The house trembles. The sun has leapt the Line and is headed north up the curve of the globe. The bay booms the night long. At sunrise, all the white bays are dark blue water full of white swans of ice cakes. The backbone of winter is broken, the larder is unlocked! Old men and young men are wading the snowdrifts in a race for young clams. They turn over the ice cakes and dredge up the grooved quahaugs. The family eat them raw and dripping from the shell. Supper is tender clams fried in batter, and the house is like a tree full of bluebirds in full throat.
Spring is here with both feet, in two feet of snow. The children go to school by boat now, though the ways are still icy. The high-run tides of the year fill every cove and almost float away the fishhouse. Arrowhead after arrowhead of wild geese goes north, the birds' heads float free ahead of their long necks, and the sound of their honking goes endlessly over through the night. The boat in the tool shed is all decked in forward. Now an old uncle brings on his horse-sled the first skiff for a new boy-sailor in short pants. The boy sits in it in the yard and rows with dry oars, the whole Pacific is in his blue eyes. Mother hears the first robin, and she flies to her scrub-pail and white paint; the house shines like a scoured pan.
The woodchuck climbs from his hole, he sits brown in the sun, wrinkling up his nose to the smell of growing roots. New wallpaper goes on, the girls wash their hair and lean over with it hanging in the sun. The cows are down to the bottom of the bin of middlings. Drifts disappear in a day. Green snakes of water dart through the quagmires of the roads. The earth is full of blue holes with sky in them, and the ducks make merry with quacking the livelong day. Fleets of their feathers sail on the pools. The fishhouse hums with saws and hammers, brush is lifted from the dories. And the end of the tool shed swings open, and two yoke of oxen drag the high-nosed reach-boat to the cove, with the small boy in it floating on air. The good smell of paint is blown along the wind, the boat turns white outside and green in; the engine is blocked up in place and the shaft and propeller lined up true. The huge boat rides the rollers and goes into the sea. All the dories slide into the water. The young boy's boat takes her maiden dip.
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