The Home Front:
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT Sudden and Unanimous Spring By William E. Bohn THIS YEAR, spring has arrived with dramatic unanimity. The second week of April began with such an Easter as no one can recall. Blue...
...During the evening, as I stretched back in my chair with the feeling of satisfaction which accompanies a slight stiffness of the muscles...
...But when all their little throats are swelling, when all their varied notes join to form a chorus of perfect harmony, it seems as if the earth itself were singing, as if the sky were showering down melody...
...Against the walls and along the garden rows, the daffodils, tulips, hyacinths and narcissi were suddenly released...
...There were only streaks and glitterings of its accustomed glory...
...The forsythia tried its best, but all through March and the beginning of April it struggled in vain to present its usual shower of gold...
...The Japanese cherries could muster only suggestions of the clouds of rich pink which are their regular contribution to the vernal show...
...We were, of course, not content to look and listen...
...A similar report can be made of the flowering shrubs and trees...
...There never were so many cars getting in one another's way...
...Beauty does not come of itself...
...And they don't count, for they defy frost and snow and thermometer...
...I don't really care why they sing...
...There were more Easter sunrise assemblies than ever before —and all of them attended by the largest crowds on record...
...In particular, there never were so many new ones, so many duo- and tri-tinted ones, so many gaily shining ones...
...there was never so much...
...To have flowers in summer and autumn, the gardener must toil in the spring—as tiresome schoolmasters and preachers keep reminding us...
...And that is the way it was that Easter day...
...There were more great golden bushes of forsythia than you could remember having seen before...
...For the first time, we have a cold-frame—and a very nice one...
...The flowering cherries and magnolias on our lawns and on those of our neighbors—as far as the eye could see?billowed toward the sky...
...We have eight or nine different sorts of birds eating at our arboreal cafeteria all winter long...
...Everyone knows that this has been a backward season...
...On this Easter morn, they were all singing full-throat...
...You kept saying to yourself: "It was never like this before...
...And then, to make everything better than good, the choir of birds was out in full force...
...This time, we were inaugurating an interesting experiment...
...And the buds on the magnolia trees, try as they would, could not manage to open...
...I notice that most of it stops when the babies are hatched...
...It was so good that all the pictures preserved by memory seemed feeble by comparison...
...But the daffodils and tulips, which usually furnish the chief glory of spring gardens, were retarded by temperatures which lingered between 30 and 40...
...The robins are back—and the grack-les, the redwinged blackbirds, the bluebirds, the flickers and a lot of others...
...All their melody may have a merely biological motive...
...But all these shows put on by ambitious humans seemed not very impressive in comparison with the displays suddenly provided by Dame Nature herself...
...Through March and early April, practically nothing bloomed except a few snowdrops and crocuses...
...I, of course, was insinu-uating a few rows of tomatoes, peppers and broccoli...
...But lately the aristocrats who can't stand our rough climate have returned from their swell winter resorts in Florida, Jamaica and Brazil...
...it was never so lovely...
...So we were drawing the little drills and planting the seeds of flowers which are to grow for summer cutting—zinnias, asters, snapdragons, marigolds...
...I gleaned the comforting information from the garden section of the Times that during the past ten years the number of citizens who plant trees has increased at the rate of 10 per cent each year...
...All of a sudden, the world was perfect...
...So the afternoon of that perfect Easter day was spent on our knees in the garden...
...And, incidentally, there were never so many traffic jams, and the accidents were more numerous than on any other day since records have been kept...
...I learned that two-thirds of all our rose bushes are grown in Texas...
...Then, suddenly, on Easter morn everything burst forth at once...
...And just as I was dropping off to sleep...
...According to the New York Police, two million paraders displayed their finery along Fifth Avenue...
...Blue skies and balmy breezes invited young and old to come forth and greet the budding year...
...You would have thought that this thing had been timed by some supreme stage-manager...
...But if any buds appeared, they remained for weeks a dull green without a gleam of yellow...
...The green leaves unfolded way back before the calendar announced that winter was ended...
...Wouldn't you know...
...It was a day that was in practically every way gorgeously special...
...Then we began to dig holes for some hemlocks, spruces and dogwoods, which are soon to usurp a part of the space heretofore devoted to my useful vegetables...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 17
