Begins with Mayairs. The adder casts his skin and leaves it like a curl of spring sky on the hot ledge; and the farmer sloughs off his thick flannels. But the old man feels the cold still in his narrow bones, and he sticks to his “longones.” The south slopes of the hills scent the south winds with Mayflowers. The first few flies bumble about in the kitchen. It turns sharp in a night, and the ducks waddle sad on a hard and waterless world. Grandma dreams of white roses, and there will be a death in the family within the year. The sun comes out hot. Brooks run like wildfire. Carkins shake out their gilt tassels on the popple trees. Comes a freeze, and the loud little brooks fall quiet. It snows deep. The sun comes out strong. All the snow melts. The ducks are wild on many sudden waters.
The cosset lamb grows into a burden and is turned out of the kitchen to fend for himself where the green blades of grass are pricking through the world.
It rains, and it clears. It rains, and it shines.
The feast of the season is alewives. For the fattest of the herring have returned, and the land near all the brooks is frosted with their scales. The Abenaki fish steams in all kitchens, and the rich aroma of its baking and roasting and frying and broiling and boiling and sousing in vinegar goes out over the whole coast. The woman of the house fries it in butter, and the man and the children let it melt in their mouths and blow out the myriads of bones. The woman boils it with pork, and the family pushes out the lacework of bones on their tongues. The woman bakes it in the family bean pot with vinegar, strips of salt pork, cloves, and cinnamon added, and there are no bones to blow out at all.
Frog spawns string miles of jet-andcrystal beads through the marsh pond. The small boy is up to his busy butt in watery business, and his new rubber boots come home full of water. He gets it laid on to his breeches in the woodshed for his third set of wet feet in a morning; and the heat of his father's broad hand wards off the fever and snuffles. The horse sled is greased and put up, the crosscut saw is oiled and hung on the rafter. The children are greased deep with goose grease, and it will be a sharp cold that gets through it. In the swamp the treestumps bleed a honey that attracts the gilt flies. Now the farmer looks to his plow, his whiffletrees and his axles, there is great mending of cart wheels and jingling of chains and harness; gear is made ready against the minute the frost is all out of the ground.
Suddenly, one clear twilight, under the first dewdrop star, the peepers begin, their silvery notes spread out thick as the stars are over the meadows. Ways grow foul, carts go hub-deep in yellow mud. A fortnight passes with no getting to town. The woman of the house scrapes the bottom of the flour barrel, but she cuts her coat to suit her cloth and makes out with a big pan of johnnycake. And there is hot lobster stew, pink with coral, for supper. The big boy digs his three bushels of clams a tide and puts his silver coins in the stocking towards the new twenty-two rifle.
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.
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.