Now the bay blossoms with white- and-green buoys, the new lobster boat is busy, and the man of the farm comes home laden with dark green dragons. The small boy stands by his father and heads out to sea, the spray from the bone in her mouth snows them over and over. The sea gulls have come down from inland, they follow the boat and the bait, they cry high for joy of the sea and spring. The girls are papering the playhouse. White herring are climbing the falls of the stream to lay their eggs in sweet water. The men dip them by barrels. The smokehouse starts smoking. Mother beats the rugs on the clothesline to storms of dust between squalls of snow and quick rain. There are dirty patches of snow in the spruce woods still, but green grass is pricking the south-sloping sides of ditches.
The breeches on the small boy are a sight for each evening, for he sops up the black mud and the blue on his base of operations. The girls bake a batch of mud pies in the sun. The woodchuck is full of tender sprouts, and he meditates an addition to his family and a new sitting-room. The children cough and sneeze, and the jar of goose grease comes out again. The young boy is as slippery with it as the eel he has caught is with the gurry. The hylas and frogs sing faster and faster, and the long evenings are like a thousand sleigh bells.
Taurus now is the sign, the little ramlambs leap up with stiff legs five feet into the sky, they jump over their mother and race six together the length of the meadow. The young man blushes to think what he thinks when the girl of the island fills his mind. The days are quicksilver, the evenings clear amber. Fresh food comes dripping from the flats and the fathoms. People eat well and live high. The farmer goes early to bed to his woman. The small boy makes the small girl with the molasses curls a willow whistle on the long way from school, slipping the bark off with spit and notching the slot. He blows notes on it till the girl's eyes swim with adoration. She drinks in his wide-eared beauty under swollen buds, which look like so many silver buttons as they run with the fire of the new moon.
Love in April is like a silver knife, Kiss a girl in April, kiss her for life.
The bluebirds are back, the robins are back; the yellowhammers, the song sparrows come in with a rush at sunup; birds fill the woods up with rolling bubbles of music.
The tall boy in man's clothes is turning the old shack at the cove into a neat cottage, and his eyes are as bright as the new ten-penny nails he is driving into his rising home. The wicker eel pots turn out yellow-bellied eels, and the small boy, empty for love, eats the chevroned, brown, fried eels till he founders. Grandma has her eels smothered. The cows are let out hungry to the new grass; they ride one another's backs, and the bull will have much business among them. The young man blushes like a beet to see them. The bees crawl out of the hive and turn to golden bullets, but except for a few drops of honey from the last Mayflowers, they come scolding home empty.
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