Now they take away the brush from the house and lay bare the ice under. New brush fires send up zigzagging stars. The big boy and his father get their dip nets and go through the dusk to the surging brook with a lantern. The small boy tags along adhesively. The arrows of smelt come up over the rocks; the men dip them out of the air and the pools, the small boy takes off his cap and fills it with live slivers of silver. They fry the fish by the water's edge and eat them with scraps of salt pork under an arch of stars.
Ponds break up now, and the trout rises to the slender green flies. The new baby smiles his first smile, and the whole family is proud to see it. The girls make many paper baskets and hang them deep with pink, green, blue, and yellow curls of tissue, twisting it up into long curls like their own with a flick of the blade of the scissors. The small boy goes trailing clouds of tissue streamers to the molasses-curls house. His heart pounds louder than the knocker on the door, he drops the May basket, gumdrops and all, and runs for dear life. But the small girl catches him at the stonewall's angle, and the boy gets his first kiss away from home. He comes home in taut breeches, treading right on the twinkling stars.
It is a mouth of buds and little boys in love, and of great promises, for all its mud and snow, and life at last moves out of the house and under the good sun.
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