Comes in with vast winds. The oaks roar loud on the bay, the elmssing high over the house all the night, the sun rolls out of the ocean like a golden oxcart wheel, and March comes in like the lion. A blizzard twilights the noon, but the clouds rip apart, and the arms of the climbing young sun come down with long light and handle the blinding jewels of the ice-bound islands on the sea.
The dish of the month is pigs' feet with dumplings. The women bring in the pig-trotters stiff with winter from the woodshed, they wash them well, sousing them in cold water to get out the frost. Then they cook them over a slow fire in the big iron kettle, till the feet grow tender, and they salt them to taste. When the meat is ready to fall from the bones, they throw into the kettle sliced onions and a clove of garlic. While these are seething, the women-folk run up the dumplings, taking two cups of sifted flour and a teaspoon of salt and pouring in water till the dough can be rolled out flat on the breadboard with the rolling pin. They cut the cloth of dough into rectangles that shrink away from the knife, douse the rectangles into the soup one by one, and keep them apart as they cook for fifteen minutes. Or if there is extra hard work for the menfolk outside, the women make dough-devils, instead of dumplings, and fill the pot to the cover with the exploding snowballs of flour.
Men watch the line of dark blue beyond the headlands like so many fish hawks. It is wider this morning than it was last evening. The wind shakes the pinewoods into a high dust of ground diamonds. The lobster traps pile up like ribbed martyrs in the snow. Nights are bleatings of new lambs, and under clouds of stars a man brings into lamp-light a weak thing with a thin cry. The little girls waken and see the new woolen baby nursing at the bottle on the hearth. They baby him in their arms, and he runs about the house on legs much too large for him.
The reach-boat has grown up over the windows in the tool shed, and the man talks to the boy through a wall of curved pine. Ledges towards the sun are showing like ribs, pussy willows star the twilight. The henhouse shakes with song, it rains eggs, and the roosters are in full cry with bronze, bristling necks. The price of eggs goes to the bottom, the wife's pitcher gets no new silver, and the men get eggs morning and noon and night. The snow of the year smokes with hen-droppings. The world rises two white feet in a night, and the big boy carries the small boy pig-a-back through the drifts.
Aries has his head down and butts against the world, and his fleece tufts with white every fence and stone wall. The young man walks ten snowy miles to say ten words to a girl three islands away. He risks his life on thinned ice, but counts it worth the risk. A snowdrift goes down a foot under one day of the sun. The hams are getting down to the small ends, and the smokehouse is empty racks and rafters. But there is a smell of ocean and the south in the air. The boys and girls go to school over the bay ice but carry their long poles by the middle now in case the footing should give way.
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.
The boys stand at the bows of their skiffs with raised darts and watch for the bulges of flounders' eyes on the sunshot mud. The first flounder of the year fries and fills the house with hunger. Now the brown pasture burns with a dozen tall fires, the sons drag the cut junipers starred with emerald stones, and the father burns them on the ledge. Under a sky spilling windy stars, the small boy sleeps rolled up in the blanket with his father, and they keep warm all night from the heat in the ledge where they burned the junipers. The Indians' soapstone, the father calls this warm bed of rock; it has been handed on down to him from the ancient Abenakis.
Diapers flap from the back doorstep to the shed's end, clothespins let go in the gale, and diapers lie like patches of snow among the spruces.
Next to the lingering snowdrift, under the hot dead leaves, the small boy smells out the first Mayflowers. He uncovers a score of pink and white stars. He goes with skipping heart and leaves them, hot with the heat of his hand, in a bunch at the door of the little girl who one day will bear him his fairhaired sons. The big boy snorts at girls and makes him a clam-rocker out of his father's laths, when his father is not looking. But the boy in a man's pants picks a bunch of Mayflowers, when no one is watching, and he lays the blossoms down with his heart at the feet of the island girl. She takes up both with deep blushes.
The winds fall, the nights turn mild. And March goes out like a woolly ewelamb.