Read Ebook: The Jonathan Papers by Morris Elisabeth Woodbridge

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Ebook has 702 lines and 42049 words, and 15 pages

And so there always comes a time in the spring when I must go to my Yellow Valley. A car ride, a walk on through plain little suburbs, a scramble across fields to a seldom-used railway track, a swing out along the ties, then off across more fields, over a little ridge, and--there! Oh, the soft glory of color! We are at the west end of a miniature valley, full of afternoon sunlight slanting across a level blur of yellows and browns. On one side low brown hills enfold it, on the other runs a swift little river, whose steep farther bank is overhung with hemlocks and laurel in brightening spring green. It is a very tiny valley,--one could almost throw a stone across it,--and the whole bottom is filled with waving grass, waist-high, of a wonderful pale straw color; last year's grass, which the winter snows never seem to mat down, thick-set with the tall brown stalks of last year's goldenrod and mullein and primrose. The trees and bushes are dwarf oaks, with their old leafage still clinging in tawny masses, and willows, with their bunches of slim, yellow shoots. Even the little river is yellow-brown, from the sand and pebbles and leaves of its bed, and the sun, as it slants down the length of the valley, wraps it in a warm, yellow haze.

I call the valley mine, for no one else seems to know it. The long grass is never cut, but left to wave its glory of yellow all through the fall and winter and spring. There is a little footpath running through it, but I never see any one on it. I often wonder who makes all the footpaths I know, where no one ever seems to pass. Is it rabbits, or ghosts? Whoever they may be, in this case they do not trouble me, and the valley is as much mine as though I had cut it out of a mediaeval romance.

It is always very quiet here. At least it seems so, though full of sound, as the world always is. But its sounds are its own; perhaps that is the secret; the rustle of the oak leaves as the wind fumbles among them; the swish-swish of the long dry grasses, which can be heard only if one sits down in their midst, very still; the light, purling sounds of the river; the soft gush of water about some bending branch as its tip catches and drags in the shifting current. The winds lose a little of their fierceness as they drop into the valley, and they seem to have left behind them all the sounds of the outer world which they usually bear. If now and then they waft hitherward the long call of a locomotive, they soften it till it is only a dreamy reminder.

It is strange that in a spot so specially full of the tokens of last year's life,--the dry grasses, the old oak leaves not yet pushed off by the new buds,--where the only green is of the hemlocks and laurels that have weathered the winter,--it is strange that in such a spot one should feel the immanence of spring. Perhaps it is the bluebird that does it. For it is the bluebird's valley as well as mine. There are other birds there, but not many, and it is the bluebird which best voices the spirit of the place. Most birds in the spring imply an audience. The song sparrow, with the lift and the lilt of his song, sings to the universe; the red-wing calls to all the sunny world to be gleeful with him; the long-drawn sweetness of the meadowlark floats over broad meadows and wide horizons; the bobolink, in the tumbling eagerness of his jubilation, is for every one to hear. But the bluebird sings to himself. His gentle notes, not heard but overheard, are for those who listen softly. And in the Yellow Valley he is at home.

I am at home, too, and I find there something that I find nowhere else so well. Its charm is in the simpleness of its appeal:--

"Only the mightier movement sounds and passes, Only winds and rivers--"

I bring back from it a memory of sunshine and grass, bird notes and running water, the broad realities of nature. Nay, more than a memory--a mood that holds--a certain poise of spirit that comes from a sense of the largeness and sweetness and sufficiency of the whole live, growing world. Spring grass--the rare fragrance of the spring air--is the call. The Yellow Valley holds the answer.

Larkspurs and Hollyhocks

"Jonathan, let's not have a garden."

"What'll we live on if we don't?"

"Oh, of course, I don't mean that kind of a garden,--peas and potatoes and things,-- I mean flowers. Let's not have a flower garden."

"That seems easy enough to manage," he ruminated; "the hard thing would be to have one."

"I know. And what's the use? There are always flowers enough, all around us, from May till October. Let's just enjoy them."

"I always have."

I looked at him to detect a possible sarcasm in the words, but his face was innocent.

"Perhaps grubbing was what she was after," said Jonathan.

"Well, anyway, she talked as if it was lilies."

"I don't know that that matters," he said.

Jonathan is sometimes so acute about my friends that it is almost annoying.

This conversation was one of many that occurred the winter before we took up the farm. We went up in April that year, and we planted our corn and our potatoes and all the rest, but no flowers. That part we left to nature, and she responded most generously. From earliest spring until October--nay, November--we were never without flowers: brave little white saxifrage and hepaticas, first of all, then bloodroot and arbutus, adder's-tongue and columbine, shad-blow and dogwood, and all the beloved throng of them, at our feet and overhead. In May the pink azalea and the buttercups, in June the laurel and the daisies and--almost best of all--the dear clover. In summer the deep woods gave us orchids, and the open meadows lilies and black-eyed Susans. In September the river-banks and the brooks glowed for us with cardinal-flower and the blue lobelia, and then, until the frosts settled into winter, there were the fringed gentians and the asters and the goldenrod. And still the half has not been told. If I tried to name all that gay company, my tale would be longer than Homer's catalogue of the ships.

In early July a friend brought me in a big bunch of sweet peas. I buried my face in their sweetness; then, as I held them off, I sighed.

"Oh, dear!" I said.

"What's 'oh, dear'?" said Jonathan, as he took off his ankle-clips. He had just come up from the station on his bicycle.

"Nothing. Only why do people have magenta sweet peas with red ones and pink ones--that special pink? It's just the color of pink tooth-powder."

"You might throw away the ones you don't like."

"No, I can't do that. But why does anybody grow them? If I had sweet peas, I'd have white ones, and pale lavender ones, and those lovely salmon-pink ones, and maybe some pale yellow ones--"

"Sweet peas have to be planted in March," said Jonathan, as he trundled his wheel off toward the barn.

Perhaps the sweet peas began it, but I really think the whole thing began with the phlox.

One afternoon in August I walked down the road through the woods to meet Jonathan. As he came up to me and dismounted I held out to him a spray of white phlox.

"Where do you suppose I found it?" I asked.

"Down by the old Talcott place," he hazarded.

"No. There is some there, but this was growing under our crab-apple trees, right beside the house."

"Well, now, it must have been some of Aunt Deborah's. I remember hearing Uncle Ben say she used to have her garden there; that must have been before he started the crab orchard. Why, that phlox can't be less than forty years old, anyway."

"Dear me!" I took back the delicate spray; "it doesn't look it."

"No. Don't you wish you could look like that when you're forty?" he philosophized; and added, "Is there much of it?"

"Five or six roots, but there won't be many blossoms, it's so shady."

"We might move it and give it a chance."

"Let's! We'll dig it up this fall, and put it over on the south side of the house, in that sunny open place."

When October came, we took Aunt Deborah's phlox and transplanted it to where it could get the sunshine it had been starving for all those years. I sat on a stump and watched Jonathan digging the holes.

"You don't suppose Henry will cut them down for weeds when they come up, do you?" I said.

"Seems probable," said Jonathan. "You might stick in a few bulbs that'll come up early and mark the spot."

"Oh, yes. And we could put a line of sweet alyssum along each side, to last along after the bulbs are over."

"You can do that in the spring if you want to. I'll bring up some bulbs to-morrow."

The winter passed and the spring came--sweet, tormenting.

"Jonathan," I said at luncheon one day, "I got the sweet alyssum seed this morning.

"Sweet alyssum?" He looked blank. "What do you want sweet alyssum for? It's a foolish flower. I thought you weren't going to have a garden, anyway."

"I'm not; but don't you remember about the phlox? We said we'd put in some sweet alyssum to mark it--so it wouldn't get cut down."

"The bulbs will do that, and when they're gone it will be high enough to show."

"Well, I have the seed, and I might as well use it. It won't do any harm."

"No. I don't believe sweet alyssum ever hurt anybody," said Jonathan.

That evening when he came in I met him in the hall. I had the florist's catalogue in my hand. "Jonathan, it says English daisies are good for borders."

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