APRIL: BOUGHT AND PAID FOR

...Chickadees that mobbed me a month ago, begging for sunflower seeds, were flitting about the top twigs of the apple trees, twittering like lovesick swains, which half of them no doubt were...

...The trucks couldn't get out of Hartford or Albany...

...During the winter, one storm took quite a patch of old shingles off the roof of the shop...

...In February he is almost as comatose as a steamed clam...

...No," I said...

...He happens to be a countryman, who has been just getting in his car and coming, for a long time...

...I saw a woodchuck last week...

...The store manager asked, "How are the roads...

...If it isn't one thing, it's something else...

...It said one farmer now produces enough to feed thirty-three people...

...The air was balmy, the sky was blue as a blonde baby's eyes, and a pileated woodpecker was pounding out a lovesong on a dead popple up in the woods...

...He looked at me, astonished...

...Particularly in the spring, when we have that feeling of well-being at having bought and paid for such a season...

...Nobody is probing your psyche or prodding your conscience or engaging you in group therapy...

...They got about six inches in Hartford, about the same as here...

...Anyway, it rained, and I slept, tired and pleased with the world around me...

...And early plowing means early planting...

...Albert snorted...

...Bank fishing has a good deal to recommend it, in early spring...

...He looked out the door at the rain, still coming down...

...I made temporary repairs, and now it was time to do the job right...

...And," I added, "it said most things done on farms now are for exercise and for fun...

...It is a good feeling...

...It wasn't where I wanted to plant the peas, but I turned over a few forkfuls just to smell the soil...

...It is spring, by the calendar and the almanac, and even by the sun, and we probably won't have any more paralyzing snowstorms for another eight or nine months...

...It took most of that day, between working and looking, but I got the roof repaired before dark...

...Summer is too hot and too dry...

...One spends so much of his time on the ground, in the country at least, that getting up on a roof or climbing an apple tree to do a bit of pruning is well worth the risk to middle-aged bones...

...Why anyone ever started the rumor that the woodchuck would have anything worth listening to to say about winter is beyond me...

...I know what his answer would have been, though: "Are you kidding...

...The shop is a one-time chicken-house...

...Borland's own books are "Countryman," "When the Legends Die," and "This Hill, This Valley...

...But there it was...

...A rain like that would leach the frost out of the ground, make the fields ready for spring plowing...

...In the open there was a flinty layer of frost a few inches down, but where I had dumped leaves from the maples last October, to work into the soil this spring, the fork went down easily...

...Pussy willows are out and beginning to show traces of yellow pollen on their silvery fur...

...I wasted most of the afternoon and caught three fish, none of them worth cleaning or eating...

...And I thought, before I settled down to work with the new shingles, that we all should climb a ladder of some kind, now and then, and look all the way back to boyhood and all the way down to the paths we walk every day without really seeing them...

...Maybe there is a more comfortable early spring sound than the drip of rain from the eaves and the gurgle in the downspout, but I don't know what it is...

...We like to get oats in, around here, by mid-April, corn by the tenth of May at the latest...

...Albany's in quite a mess, and so's Hartford...

...Leaves make a good insulator...

...The fishing wasn't very productive, in terms of fish...

...Particularly when there have been several years of drought...

...The red osier stems are blood-red and the weeping willow withes look as though they were pulsing with clover honey...

...With so much of the country now urbanized, maybe we can no longer afford winter...

...With water shortages all over the Northeast, and elsewhere, the melting snow and the spring rains will run off all the parking fields and shopping centers and super-highways and all the stripped and bulldozed hillsides and go boiling down the streams to the sea instead of soaking into the ground and filling the reservoirs...

...I felt almost as good as those grinning, white-haired models in the insurance companies' annuity advertisements...

...After one mildly stormy weekend I drove to the village Monday morning to get some pipe tobacco and a few groceries...

...It was still raining the next morning, and when I went to the village on an errand I stopped at Albert's place, half a mile down the road, and found him in his dairy barn...

...In my youth I cleaned enough chickenhouses to last me all my life, so when we came here I mucked this one out, painted the walls, put in a bench, and set up the power tools that a countryman needs for making periodic repairs to his house and outbuildings...

...How did you get through...

...A couple of years ago we replaced the big doors on the old barn, and last fall I laid a new cement step at the back door of the house...

...Maybe those scientists are right...

...He finished washing his milking machine, set the cans to drain, and dried his hands...

...I went out to the vegetable garden plot and got a fork to see if the frost was out of the ground, if I could open up a row for early peas...

...But it was true, as I found out when the rural mailman came past at noon...

...I don't like heights, but after I got up there I sat for twenty minutes, just looking...

...Doesn't make sense," I said...

...He smiled...

...When I was a youngster I sometimes climbed up to sit in the big door of the haymow, feet dangling, and look down on the barnyard...

...Millstone brook was chattering, a patch of celandine was green as grass, and the pasture grass was beginning to show first signs of life at the root...

...It also said animals now are pets, not producers, on thousands of farms...

...But summer is coming, sure as sunrise...

...He has bought and paid for it by putting up with a New England winter...

...I felt so good that the next morning I got out tools and a ladder and set to work repairing the roof of the toolshop...

...I fished from the riverbank, since I hadn't yet put the boat in the water...

...You just toss the line out and sit and watch the bobber, or just sit and think, or just sit...

...Among Mr...

...It isn't like the view from a jet airliner, which flies so high and so fast you lose the details and get only a generalized diagram...

...A convention of eminent scientists had just said that though we still weren't able to change the weather at will we had better start a crash program in that field because our large and complex society now needs some kind of weather control...

...Just heard on the radio," he said, "that traffic's all tied up...

...But it is the knowledge, the certainty, that the snow won't stay on the ground very long and the peepers will be out again by the end of the week, celebrating life and hollering for mates...

...The postal department improved things and expedited matters by shifting from trains to trucks, and the trucks bogged down in a routine snowstorm that snarled up the urban centers...

...Maybe they're right, at that," he finally said...

...With April here, there will be no stopping May...

...Maybe we got off easy," I said...

...Florida had been frosted, as usual, and they were saying, also as usual, that the vegetables and citrus crops were ruined...

...But that crisis is past, for this year at least...

...Complete self-sufficiency went out with the ox-yoke, but some of us die-hards can't see the sense in calling a plumber to replace a faucet washer or a carpenter to put up a new shelf in the pantry...

...It's more of a crow's-eye view, close enough to be familiar yet high enough to see things you never noticed on the ground...

...And just in time, because it began to rain before we went to bed, one of those slow, steady, typical March rains that sounds like sleet on the window panes but keeps on dripping from the roof...

...It is more daylight than darkness for the first time since Thanksgiving, and the daylight lengthening day by day...

...But we have made our deal and we stick to it, and finally we get spring, clear and paid for, and we can walk out across our pastureland and our fields and know we are square with the world and the year...

...Pretty bad...

...The next thing on the schedule is floods...

...From up on the shop roof that morning, I could see Canaan Mountain, which is hidden from us here at the house by a low hill and the tall maples, and it took me back to that haystack view, when I knew that someday I would have to go and see what lay beyond the mountains, and to the haymow view when I found the barnyard itself a place of brand new wonders...

...They didn't actually say it, but they seemed to be thinking of outlawing winter, planning for something like perpetual spring...

...It was an afternoon I bought and paid for shoveling snow back in January...

...got in my car and came...

...We get a lot of exercise and have a lot of fun, don't we...

...About spring and summer, yes, and even about fall...

...I wanted to ask him where he was on Candlemas Day, but he wasn't in the mood for an interview...

...If Groundhog Day came in October and forecast the beginning rather than the end of winter, I might put some credence in it...

...Spring, of course, is not all April showers and blue skies and flocks of robins fresh from the South and shouting "Hallelujah...

...I stood there in the rain and listened, and felt like singing myself...

...He is the editor of a new book, "Our Natural World...

...I saw it...

...Then he said, "You see that piece in the paper yesterday...

...Three weeks ago I was shoveling snow, and quite a lot of people who seemed to forget the facts of winter were complaining bitterly about patches of ice on the roads...

...Here in the dooryard the purple crocuses were in bloom—the field mice seem to have found and eaten all the yellow ones, though how they can sort them out by color by tasting the corms is beyond me—and the first hungry bees were swarming all over them...

...We seldom make much fuss about the price though there are days, along in late February and early March, when we wonder if there shouldn't be a slight discount, the way there used to be when one paid cash for a car...

...That old marmot, who has been using the same den for the past five years, has his own solution for winter...

...And I thought of the way he will stop his tractor in the middle of a field to listen to a bluebbird, and the way I have seen him just stand and look at a clump of popples all misty-green with opening buds...

...So I got up on the roof to go to work...

...I hope it keeps up all day," and I echoed his words...

...Maybe in time the out-landers will begin to understand that, too...

...Out-landers may come to the country for fun and exercise, but even we who live here the year around have our times of pleasure and enduring satisfaction...

...His ancestors worked it out, eons ago...

...I understand the psychologists don't recommend just sitting, but I doubt that many of them have tried it on a riverbank in the month of March—with a fish pole in hand, and a bobber to watch if you feel like it, and the slow flow of a river at your feet...

...We only had about six inches...

...Our large and complex society had got itself into such a fix that a six-inch snowfall stopped the mail...

...A big flock of migrant robins was in my home pasture the other morning and the red-wing blackbirds have been o-ka-leeing in the trees along the river the past two weeks...

...The first thing he said was, "Good rain...

...No mail today," he said...

...How many pets have you got in this barn...

...I went back to my car, to go on in to town, but before I got in I heard a song sparrow fairly bursting his throat in a big elm across the road...

...I just HAL BORLAND, the distinguished nature writer, writes the editorials on nature for The New York Times...

...And before that I climbed to the top of a haystack and looked at the mountains on the far horizon, mountains I couldn't see from the ground...

...But when I saw him the other day he was fully alive and looking for food...

...Speed on the through-ways was reduced to forty-five miles an hour, and they felt abused and put upon...

...Last year wasn't so bad," I said...

...Not too good, either...

...You get a new perspective...

...By June and July we will hear the cries of thirst and water shortage again...

...I asked...

...Winter is too cold and too snowy...

...I came back to the house feeling ten years younger and with the best appetite I've had in two months...

...And, cold and damp as it was, I saw the gleaming wriggle of a couple of big angleworms...

...He goes to sleep and ignores it...

...Sometimes it is the peepers yelping loudly in the bog-land one warm afternoon and ice on the pools and snow in the air the next morning...

...So I went fishing that afternoon...

...Maybe we can't afford summer either...

...Maybe it'll be a better year," Albert said...