The Sign of the Shad-bush

The shad-bush is open! My bees have seen the sign. They are dropping down upon the alighting-boards of their hives and running with little bags of gold into the still half-closed entrances. During the sunny hours of the last three weeks there has been a quiet buzzing about the hives: the bees have been visiting the early alders, the soft maples, and the dusty-catkined willows; but not before to-day, the first day of the blowing shad-bush, have things been busy at the hives,—have they hummed.

Off along the meadows I can see large patches of garnet against the purple of the sky,—the bloom of the red maples. As I approach, a soft murmur around and through the misty garnet fills the air, like the murmur of a million tiny tongues. Nearer still, and I can see the bees. Here is where they are getting their gold. But not all of it. Some of it to-day is coming from the marsh marigolds.

Early in April, before the shad-bush had opened, or a bee had ventured to the meadows, I picked the first hardy blossom of the marigolds out of icy water, out of mud that had barely thawed. A token this, a promise; but not the sure sign of spring. The bees did not see it; they were waiting, like me, for the shad-bush. So were the marigolds, for to-day the low, wet edge of the meadow ditch is all aglow with the shining of their gold, which the bees are pocketing by the thighful. Among the “flowers,” the marigolds are the first here to offer a harvest for the hives.

The procession is under way. The assembling began weeks ago, with the March hepatica, the stray April arbutus, windflower, spice-bush, and bloodroot. There were saxifrage and everlasting out, too; but they all came singly and timidly. There was no movement of the flowers until the shad-bush opened. Now the marigolds appear in companies, the windflowers drift together, and the hepaticas, leading the line, make a show. The procession of the flowers has started; spring is here.

My spring, I should have said. Your spring came long ago, perhaps, or still delays. “The dandelion tells me when to look for the swallow, the dog-tooth violet when to expect the wood thrush, and when I have found the wake-robin in bloom I know the season is fairly inaugurated. With me this flower is associated, not merely with the awakening of Robin, for he has been awake some weeks, but with the universal awakening and rehabilitation of Nature.”

I watch for the sign of the shad-bush. Spring! There is the smell of spring in the yellow spice-bush; the sound of spring in the trills of the hylas; the color of spring in the blue of the hepatica. A February rain spatters your face with spring; the wild geese trumpet spring in the gray skies as they pass; the bluebird brings spring in spite of your fears and the weather:—

All white and still lie stream and hill—

The winter cold and drear!

When from the skies, a bluebird flies

And—spring is here!

True enough. But then suddenly the bluebird disappears; a heavy snowstorm sets in (as happened not many springs ago), and thousands of the birds perish. Spring was here. It has gone again. And so it will come and go until the shad-bush blooms—for me.

You will not miss one of the returning birds, not even the wild geese; not one of the early flowers, either, by waiting for the shad-bush. The skunk-cabbage and pussy-willow are still in blossom; and still in the woods and fields is the smell of the soil,—that fragrance, that essence which is the breath of the wakening earth. You can yet taste it on the lips of the hepatica, the arbutus, and bloodroot. It still lingers on the early catkins, too,—a strangely rare and delicate odor, that is not of the flowers at all, but of the earth, and sweeter than any perfume that the summer can distill.

It has been a slow, unwilling season until to-day, so slow that the green still shows richest in the sheltered meadows, and the lively color on the rocky slope that runs up from my tiny river is largely the color of mosses and Christmas ferns. Here is a stretch of southern exposure, however, and here are spots where springtime came weeks ago. Already the dog-tooth violets are out in a sunny saucer between the rocks; just above them, on an unshaded shelf, is a patch of saxifrage, and close at hand among the clefts, their “honey pitcher upside down,” swing the first of my columbines.

Yet Spring does not come thus by spots; she does not crawl out and sun herself like a lizard. The columbine seeks the sun, but the hepaticas came up and opened their exquisite eyes in the deepest, dampest shadows of the woods. I have seen them and the lingering snowdrifts together. Many of them are never touched with a sunbeam, their warmth and life coming from within, from a store saved through the winter, rather than from without. Here under the mat of fallen leaves and winter snow they have kept enough of the summer to make a spring.

The fires of summer are never out. They are only banked in the winter, smouldering always under the snow, and quick to brighten and burst into blaze. There came a warm day in January, and across my thawing path crawled a woolly bear caterpillar, a vanessa butterfly flitted through the woods, and the juncos sang. That night a howling snowstorm swept out of the north. The coals were covered again. So they kindled and darkened, until to-day they leap from the ashes of winter, a pure, thin blaze in the shad-bush, to burn higher and hotter across the summer, to flicker and die away, a line of yellow embers in the weird witch-hazel of the autumn.

At the sign of the shad-bush the doors of my springtime swing wide open. My birds are back, my turtles are out, my squirrels and woodchucks show themselves, my garden is ready to plough and plant. There is not a stretch of woodland or meadow now that shows a trace of winter. Over the pasture the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the haze, on the distant hills, floating down in the night, had been caught in the dew-wet grass. They wash the field to its borders in their delicate azure hue.

Along with the bluets (“innocence” we should always call them), under the open sky, there unroll in the wet shaded bottoms of the maple swamps the pointed arum leaves of the Jacks, or Indian turnips. How they fight for room! There are patches where all the pews are pulpits, with some of the preachers standing three deep.

Now why should there be such a scramble for place among the Jacks, while just above them in the dry woods the large showy lady’s-slipper opens in isolated splendor? Here is one, yonder another, with room between for a thousand. Occasionally you will see a dozen together, though not in a crowd; but more often the solitary blossom opens alone and far removed from any of its kind.

The lady’s-slippers, however, are really social compared with the arbutus. Here is a flower that is naturally tribal,—bound together by common root-stalks, trailing shrubby plants that seem free to possess the earth. They were doubtless here in the soil before the Pilgrim came. The angels planted them, I am sure, for they smell of a celestial garden. The paths of heaven are carpeted with them, not paved with gold. But something is the matter with this earthly soil. They grow just where they were originally planted and nowhere else. There was a patch set in the woods three quarters of a mile, as the crow flies, from my front door. That was several millenniums ago. It is there still, a patch as big as my hat. There are other scattered bits of it beyond, but none any nearer to me, yet the soil seems the same, and there are woods all the way between.

Were it as common as the violet, perhaps some of its sweetness would be lost upon us. After all, the heavenly streets may be paved with gold, and instead of a carpet of arbutus, we shall find patches of it only, hidden away under the fallen leaves of the Elysian groves. For we shall need to get out of even the celestial city into the open fields and woods, and I can think of nothing so likely to draw us away from our mansions and beyond the pearly gates as the chance to go “May-flowering.”

And, even here below, among the unransomed souls of Boston, when Mayflower-time arrives, you may see young men and maidens, children and grandfathers, trooping out to the woods for a handful of the flowers. And up from the Cape, to those who cannot go into the woods, the flowers, themselves, come,—tight, naked bunches, stripped of all but the pink of their faces and the sweet of their souls. They possess every quarter of the city. Jew and Gentile sell them, Greek and Barbarian buy them, as they buy and sell no other wild flower.

Why, then, is it not the arbutus, instead of the shad-bush, that spells for me the spring? I don’t know; unless it is because the shad-bush takes deeper hold upon my imagination. It certainly is not its form, or color, or fragrance,—though it has grace,—an airy, misty, half-substantial shape, a wraith in the leafless woods; it has odor, too, and color. But it is something more than all of these that the soft blowing shad-bush means to me. Perhaps the something is in its name,—because it links my inland round with the round of the sea; and because it links this present narrowing round with the wide-winging round of the past.

At the sign of the shad-bush I know the fish are running,—the sturgeon up the Delaware; the shad into Cohansey Creek; and through Five-Forks Sluice, these soft, stirring nights, I know the catfish are slipping. Is there any boy now in Lupton’s Meadows to watch them come? to listen in the moonlit quiet for the splash, splash, as the fish pass up through the main ditch toward the dam?

At the sign of the shad-bush how swiftly the tides of life rise! how mysteriously their currents run! drifting, flying, flowing, creeping—colors, perfumes, forms, and voices—across the heavens, over the earth, and down the deep, dim aisles of the sea! and down the deep, dim aisles of our memories.