The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
By William E. Bohn The Increasingly Wonderful World RECENTLY I HAVE discovered a secret about myself. For no very good reason I have been looking over my old columns, starting with 1944. Many, of...
...Every season I have strained language to the breaking point...
...But, inevitably, Spring, the old darling of the poets, has received more than its share of attention...
...The spring of 1960 belongs to the past...
...It spoke of things far off which might be seen, heard and enjoyed...
...The laying out of parks and the designing of private gardens had barely begun to be popular...
...Often I have held forth about deep, warm Summer, rich and fruitful Autumn and riotous and rambunctious Winter...
...Every spring the air is more and more filled with fragrance...
...And the nurserymen have become our most prosperous merchants...
...And as I leaf through the old columns I am most amused to discover that every springtime has been the most beautiful, the most gorgeous, the most colorful, the most utterly tuneful and expressive that I have ever experienced...
...The first is that in my lifetime there has been increasing attention paid to beauty...
...The second reason the spring of 1960 seems more gorgeous than any before is that sensitivity increases with age...
...Our whole population is becoming more and more garden-conscious...
...Many, of course, are about politics and economics, but a goodly portion are concerned with such really important subjects as weather, climate, flowers, seasons, trees, birds and gardens...
...Inevitably I have written about the different seasons...
...There is nothing at all ridiculous about this sort of forever-doubling enthusiasm...
...The words were too plain, too used-up, to do the job I demanded of them...
...Nothing which I have experienced in my life, I think, has gone deeper or meant more...
...But there is this one advantage about advancing years: The oldster, if he has his wits about him, sees more, hears more and appreciates more...
...There, just at sundown, I would hear a strangely lovely song I had never heard elsewhere...
...I am writing for myself, about what I see and hear, and every year it seems to me that there are more and sweeter blossoms, more and richer melodies from the birds...
...Most of the things oldsters tell you about the advantages of the mounting years are pure bunk...
...There is only one youth allotted to each of us...
...Herrick was right: Make the most of it as it flies...
...But, on the other hand, there was nothing like the ornamental planting we have now...
...Now I see people planting trees and shrubs everywhere...
...we were just in the process of destroying our great heritage of trees...
...Esthetic experiences have meant more to me as life has gone on...
...I can think of two reasons it seems that the world is expandingly wonderful...
...And so it has happened that many of my little pieces have been about life—or about the way live things act...
...This is partly because the treasures of memory are added to the delights of immediate experience...
...Sometimes I have called on Chaucer or Shakespeare or Shelley for help...
...The artificial objects which men invent and feel so proud of seem dead and stiff and uninteresting by comparison...
...I recall that when I used to be sent to the woods to drive home the cattle there was one deep, shady spot I thought was my very own...
...Later I discovered that it was the note of the veery thrush, but when I was five no one in our part of the world had ever heard of so aristocratic a bird...
...In some cases they utilize the help of professional landscape gardeners and in others they follow their own designs...
...The things that grow seem more mysterious, expressing impulses which spring from more profound sources...
...I am writing this little piece on June 15, the middle day of the month to which James Russell Lowell—among many others—paid a tribute...
...The flowers, the trees, the sky touch me more closely now and rouse more profound emotions...
...As I think it over, it seems to me that I am perfectly justified in puffing up each new season as though it were the greatest show ever on earth...
...When I was a boy there was more forest land than now...
...At least two or three times a year I have let loose about the time of birds and blossoms...
...In my case, I think that my love and appreciation of bird music was as sharp when I was five years old as it is now...
...The deepening foliage, the soft and warm air, the scent of roses on the gentle breezes—all these things speak of summer...
...But in either case, the beauty increases from year to year...
...The wealth of blossoms, the outbursts of new plants or the exuberance of old ones, the enormous variety of song just seemed too much for the plain words which I could summon from my own work-a-day vacabulary...
...Inevitably a man thinks of the change of seasons past and to come...
...It brought to me a completely strange, fresh and mysterious message...
...The ears and eyes really hear and see more: They have learned with the years...
Vol. 43 • June 1960 • No. 26
