The cuckoo warns it will turn hot, and the small boy hangs his tongue out at the hoeing. The girls play dolls in the shade. The bay turns suddenly alive at the dusk, and the tails of the shad smack the tide. Now the net is payed out of the reach boat by lantern light, cork line and lead line go over. The father and his sons sit quiet and drift with the stars. A cork bobs under the bow. Then the man stands and takes in a web of silver wires in the light of the lantern, and there is a great fish like a slab of the full moon choking to death in the mesh. Shad flop around the small boy's ankles till he is up to his knees in cold silver; he dozes, and wakes in his father's strong arms, being carried under the lantern-lit trees. Next noon there is shad baked on the beech plank, and the boy fills himself up to his eyes. The grass at the cove is specked with flakes of pure pearl, and the small boy has miles of net to untangle of seaweed and to spread out to dry in the sun.
Grandma goes to town and comes home smelling of big, flat peppermints. The sign now is Cancer, the Crab, and the young boy has bushels of crabs to pound up for the quarreling hens. Grandpa shakes his head over the mares' tails in the sky. The vane wheels s'uth-east, backs around no'theast, and it rains buckets three days. The first cinnamon roses burst open. The small dog runs afoul of a skunk and has to be buried in the garden to his nose. Tree toads laugh for the wet through the twilight.
The vane veers to the west, the clouds break, and the thrushes fill the moist world with sweet, sad evening flutes.
Now milk tastes of white clover, the hives overflow with honey, the wood-chuck's cup runs over, flowers star every inch of earth, and the fair-weather whitecaps flower the ocean.
And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.
It is the warm month, the merry month, the marriage month, and tiptop high sun of the year.
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