Comes in high-run tides in the bays and high tides of daisies. The fields are butter-and-egg fields; buttercups fill all the swales, and daisies wash up the hillside and spatter white on the sky. When the wind blows, it is pure honey for air, and all bees come home heavy and with their trousers dusted with gilt pollen. In the dawn, the woodchuck eats all the young peas. The small yellow dog digs furiously at the hole till only his hind legs are seen, but the woodchuck whistles below and sasses the dog for his trouble. Next dawn the woodchuck brings his wife and all the neighbors, and they eat all the lettuce, too.
There are five yawning mouths for the robins to put worms in over the side-porch door. The robins hop-skip along the yard and pull up angleworms as long as themselves, tip down their heads, and listen for the next one. The small boy rows his own boat out to Goose Island and back all by himself. He grows up an inch in the three hours. The ovenbirds echo hollow through the leafy woods. The qwoks cry hoarsely at their fishing all the livelong night. Beans curve up through the garden, the halves of the resurrected old beans split, and the baby bean leaves come out.
A little boy and a small dog run for running's sake by the hour, and then sleep in the warm sun curled so close together that it would take a good pair of eyes to tell which is boy, which is dog.
Now is the season of lobster stew. The lady of the house puts the children to work with hammers and breadboards, and they crack the big claws and take the meat out whole. They suck the small claws and swallow that meat as their right. They save the white blood and the green tomalley. The bowl fills slow but sure. The mother puts the lobster meat on to cook in the lobster's own juices. She puts in slabs of fresh butter, she pours in milk softly as the stew simmers on the slow fire, and she puts in cream. The family eat hot bowlsful of heaven.
The young man goes in his new shoes and his putt-putt boat over the water; the family follow in the reach boat, dressed like a Sunday on a Thursday; and there is a wedding in the little white church at the island's tip where all the windows have waves in them. The young boy takes it all in, for he feels certain he will be next. The tall new wife starts housekeeping in the cottage on the cove and burns her first johnny-cake to a cinder.
The woodchucks turn now to the late peas. Winds are all west winds or south winds, and you would think the sea was a basket of kittens, the little waves run so gentle and soft. The best flowers now take to the woods. The lady's-slipper dangles by the purple bird-on-the-wing. The dandelions are suddenly little gray-haired ghosts. The corn is the length of a man's finger, and the dangling crow's bones show like snow in his feathers.
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.