The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Over the Hump Of the Year I remember hearing the old folks say when I was a hoy that by Twelfth Night, that is, on January 6, the length of the day would have...
...Nearby is a great thicket of forsythia, with its blossoms already sufficiently unfolded to lend touches of yellow to bushes bending before the winter wind...
...Now my Old Farmer's Almanac proves that I was right...
...Now they are the centers of garden gaiety throughout the year...
...But in the country we have much more substantial and agreeable evidence of the advancing season...
...We have had enough weeks of warm, moist weather to deceive many an inexperienced plant into thinking that the time has come to unfold leaves and blossoms...
...It is true that the sun sets four minutes later at the end of that period than at the beginning, but it also rises exactly four minutes later...
...When New Year's Day is past, we turn our minds toward spring...
...Even the merchants of fertilizer and of all the fascinating gadgets which will turn my work into play are busily spending their money on advertising designed to lighten my labors and lengthen my days...
...As I wander in my garden, I view the signs of spring with mingled emotions...
...possibly...
...I suppose I must defend myself for considering these things this late in the season...
...As I stroll about on a January day with the thermometer standing at 15, I observe the buds on the dogwoods, the maples, the pines and the birches—and it seems to me that each one is a tiny bit bigger than it was yesterday...
...Only a few years ago, we had no cardinals in my section of northern Delaware once the snow began to fly...
...Most advertisers bore me, but salesmen of growth and beauty come as helpers and allies...
...So the loss at one end of the day exactly equals the gain at the other...
...It is at this season that life within doors begins to be enlivened by the gayest issues of the garden magazines and, especially, by the exuberantly colored catalogues from Burpee, Peter Henderson and the rest...
...The great outburst of glory which attracts so much attention in April and May is slowly and painstakingly prepared by hardly visible processes of nature that escape notice all through the still, cold days of winter...
...I receive them now almost every day, not only from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, as always, but from Ohio, Michigan and Iowa...
...A closer look at trees and shrubs reveals a whole world of activity...
...The mockingbirds, too are faithful neighbors...
...In the city, there is little besides sales in the department stores to remind us that we have progressed to the other side of the meteorological hill...
...It is astonishing how many gay appeals coupled with instruction are at the disposal of the most modest gardener...
...I counted eight different soils of birds about the feeding-station before my window...
...But the birds, of course, are the never-ending and constantly-increasing sources of delight...
...During the first month of the year, our passenger songsters have not yet begun to return...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Over the Hump Of the Year I remember hearing the old folks say when I was a hoy that by Twelfth Night, that is, on January 6, the length of the day would have increased as much as a rooster's crow...
...And I find that this business of the length of days is more interesting and complicated than I had thought...
...But the number of our feathered songsters who are willing to weather the cold with us is constantly increasing...
...I was always skeptical about this picturesque measurement of meteorological change...
...This very morning...
...We are accustomed to speak of December 22 as the shortest day of the year...
...But really there are nine days, from December 17 to 25, which have exactly the same length: nine hours and six minutes...
...We have passed the dark period of the year which was so unpleasant for our primitive ancestors that they invented the great festival we call Christmas to make its deprivations more tolerable...
...The squirrels and rabbits—so different in their habits and ways of making a living—are faithful collaborators through all sorts of weather...
...These thin-skinned aristocrats, who spend their winters luxuriously in Florida, Cuba, Venezuela or Brazil, will not start their northward aerial parade until Lincoln's birthday or...
...But by Twelfth Night, or Old Christmas, the gain is nine minutes, which is rather too much to be compassed by the hardiest champion of the barnyard...
...From that time on, we are blessed with one or two additional minutes of sunlight for each successive day...
...In infinitely slight gradations, buds are forming through every winter day or night—no matter how low the temperature...
...Since we thus begin to look forward rather than back, it seems to me that January is one of the most agreeable months of the year...
...Now that the temperature often goes down to 20 or even 15, I walk over ground which rings hard as steel and look sympathetically at a whole row of daffodils which have thrust their tight-folded stalks three or four inches into the frigid air...
...It is not until December 26 that an overall gain is made—and at first it is so slow that for a couple of days our proverbial bird of dawn might measure it with his merry call...
...Washington's...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 5
