This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come, they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We too," they say, "have not been idle."
Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights. ("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals of this little garden as a real gardener in green lore might be signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow marching line of little volunteers.
I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the intruders and not they--and I own that for me the time has never wholly passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the walk--such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!--and in return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine--an isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say, it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in fellowship.