High Noon

I have questions to ask—to-morrow; dreams to dream—to-morrow; things to do—to-morrow. To-day I am free in the fields; to-day I am brother to the beetle and the stone; I am neighbor to this ancient white oak in whose shade I lie; I am child to the earth. It is enough to be to-day.

How warm is this mother breast, even here, under the tree! The sun is overhead. The summer is at its height. The flood-tide of life has come. It is high noon of the year.

The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep across the field. Stream and cattle and pasture-slope are quiet in repose. The eyes of the earth are heavy. The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak begins to shift. The cattle do not move; the pasture still sleeps under the wide, white glare. But already the noon is passing.

Of the four seasons summer is the shortest, and the one we are least acquainted with. Summer is only a pause between spring and autumn, only the hour of the year’s noon. But the hour is long enough were we able to stop, to lie down under a tree for the hour, unwearied, wide-awake, and still.

We can be glad with the spring, sad with the autumn, eager with the winter; but it is hard for us to go softly, to pause, to be still, complete, sufficient, full with the full, sufficient summer; to hang poised and expanded like the broad-winged hawk yonder far up in the wide sky.

But the hawk is not still. The shadow of my oak begins to lengthen. The hour is gone even while it comes, for wavering softly down the languid air falls a yellow leaf from a slender gray birch near by. I remember, too, that on my way through the woodlot I frightened a small flock of robins from a pine; and more than a week ago the swallows were gathering upon the telegraph wires. It was springtime even yesterday; to-day there are signs of autumn everywhere. Perhaps, after all, there is no such time as summer,—no pause, no rest, no quiet in the fields, no hour of noon.

Yet I get something out of the fields, these slumberous July days, that is neither of springtime nor of autumn, a ripening, mellowing, quieting something, that falls only when the leaves hang limp, when the earth warms in the shadows, when the wood-lily opens in the sun, and the whir of the cicada times the throbbing of the heat. And when that something falls, then I know it is summer.

This is a late July day, but its dawn was still of the springtime. At daybreak the birds were singing, fresh and full-throated as in May; then the sun burned through the mist and the chorus ceased. Now I do not hear even the chewink and the talkative vireo. Only the fiery notes of the scarlet tanager come to me through the dry white heat of the noon, and the resonant, reverberated song of the indigo bunting, a hot, metallic, quivering song, as out of a hot and copper sky.

There are nestlings still in the woods. This indigo bunting has eggs or young in the bushes up the hillside; the scarlet tanager but lately finished his nest in the tall oaks; I looked in upon some half-fledged cuckoos along the fence. But all of these are late. The year’s young are upon the wing. A few of the spring’s flowers are still opening. I noticed the bees upon some tardy raspberry blossoms; and yonder, amid the fixed shining colors of the wooded ridge, I see the top of a chestnut tree, misty and tender, with foamy white bloom. These are the last of the season. The July flowering of the chestnut always seems delayed and accidental. The season’s fruit has set, is already ripening. Spring is gone; the sun is overhead; the red wood-lily is open. To-day is summer,—noon of the year.

High noon! and the hour strikes in the red wood-lily aflame in the old fields and in the low thick tangles of sweet-fern and blackberry that border the upland woods.

This is a flower of fire, the worshiper of the sun, the very heart of the summer. How impossible it would be to kindle a wood-lily on the cold, damp soil of April! It can be lighted only on this kiln-dried soil of July. This old hilly pasture is baking in the sun; the mouldy moss that creeps over its thin breast crackles and crumbles under my feet; the patches of sweet-fern that blotch it here and there crisp in the heat and fill the smothered air with a spicy breath; but the wood-lily opens wide and full, lifting its spotted lips to the Sun, for it loves his scorching kiss. See it glow! Should the withered thicket burst suddenly into a blaze it would be no wonder, so little would it take to fan these glowing petals into flame.

The marsh marigolds of May spread the meadows with a glow of warmth, yet that was but a gilded fire beside the wilting, withering heat of this midsummer lily. That early flush has gone. There is hardly a fleck of spring’s freshness and delicacy on the fields, none of the tenderness of the bluets that touched everything in May, none even of the softness of the hardwood greens that lasted far into June. The colors are set now, dry and glistening, as if varnished over. The odors, too, have changed. They were moist and faint then,—the fragrance of the breath of things. Now they are strong, pungent, heavy,—the tried out smells of the sweat of things.

Life has grown lusty and lazy and rank. It stood no higher than the heads of the violets along my little river at the coming of June; to-day I cannot catch a glimpse of the water without breaking through a hedge of swamp milkweed, boneset, and peppermint. Here are turtle-head, joe-pye-weed, jewel-weed, the budding goldenrods, and the spreading, choking, rasping smartweed. The year is full grown. It is strong, rich, luxuriant.

And how erect and unblushing! The pointed spireas, the sumacs, the thistles, this crowd along the river, this red wood-lily, even the tall swaying spray of meadow-rue! Slender, dainty, airy, the meadow-rue falls just short of grace and delicacy. It feels the season’s pride of life. It is angled, rigid, rank. Were there the slightest bend to its branches, the merest suggestion of soul to the plant, then, from root to spreading panicles, there had been more grace, more misty, penciled delicacy wrought into the tall meadow-rue than into any flower-form of my summer.

But the suggestion of soul in the meadow-rue, as in the whole face of nature, is lost in flesh. It is the body, not the spirit, that is now present. She is well fed, well clothed, opulent, mature. She is conventional,—as conventional as a single, stiff spire of the steeple-bush,—turned to such a pointed nicety as to seem done by machine.

And yet the steeple-bush rarely grows as single spires, but by the meadow-full. We rarely see a single spire. We never gather summer flowers one by one, as we gather the arbutus and hepatica of spring. Life has lost its individuality. It is all massed, crowded, communal. The odors mingle now and drift wide on the winds, and as wide on the hillsides spread the colors, gold and green and white, and, where the rocky pasture runs down to the woods, the pink of the steeple-bush, like a flush of dawn.

Across my neighbor’s pasture lies this soft glory of the spireas all through July. It runs in irregular streams down to the brook, rising there into a low-hanging bank of mist where the clustering spires of pink are interspersed with the taller, whiter meadow-sweet,—the “willow-leaved spirea.”

There are shadowy rooms in the deep woods where the spring lingers until the leaves of autumn begin to fall. Here, in July, I can find the little twin flowers Linnea and Mitchella, blossoms that should have opened with the bloodroot and anemone. But Life has largely fled the woods and left them empty and still. She is out in the open, along the roadsides, rioting in the sun. The time of her maidenhood is gone. She is entirely maternal now, bent on replenishing the earth, on reseeding it against all possibility of death. She covers the ground with seed, and fills the very air with seed that the winds may sow. She has grown lusty, bold, almost defiant, no longer asking leave, but claiming for her own the pastures, gardens, waysides, even the dumps and waste places.

Yonder where the cattle feed stands the barbed purple thistle, arrogant, royal, unapproachable by man or beast. “Stand back,” it says, by every one of its thousand nettles; “this field is mine.” How savage and how splendid it is! After the royal purple fades, the goldfinches will dare to come and eat the plumed seeds and scatter them by the million, but even the goldfinch has been known to perish upon the poisoned spikes with which the plant is armed.

As persistent and successful as the thistle, though not as arrogant and savage, grows the wild white carrot in the mowing fields. The courts have called it names and set a price upon its life. It has been pulled out, cut off and burned,—exterminated again and again by statute.

Life snaps her fingers at us in July; lays hold of us, even, as we pass, and makes us carry her burs and beggar’s-ticks for a wider planting. I am as useful as the tail of my cow. Neither the cow nor I ever come home from the July fields without an abundant sowing of stick-tights, tick-seeds, and burdock burs.

There is little beauty, fragrance, or even economic value in this wild, overrunning host of thistles, docks, daisies, plantains, yarrows, carrots, that now possess the earth; but when they crowd out along the dusty roadsides and cover the sterile, neglected, and unsightly places, we can sing, like the good gray poet, “the leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds” in our “Song of Joys.”

There is certainly some praise due the chicory, or blue corn-flower, for it is a waste transformer, a “slummer” among flowers, if ever there was one. Like the daisy, it is a foreigner; but unlike the daisy, its coming is wholly benevolent. It asks only the roadsides, and for these along only the choked, deserted stretches; and where the summer dust lies deepest. Coarse, common, weedy, it doubtless is; but it never droops in the heat, and its blue shines through the smother like azure through the mists of the sky.

The winds and the birds are the sowers of the wayside, and to them I am indebted for this touch of midsummer color. But they miss certain spots along the roads, or else these are the patches that have no deepness of earth, where the seed of the winds’ sowing can get no hold, for I have had to sow these myself. As I go up and down I carry a pocketful of sweet clover seed,—melilotus,—and over every waste and sandy place I scatter a few of the tiny seeds, when, lo! not two blades of grass where one grew before, but a patch of tall white flowers, breathing the sweetness of heaven into all the air, and humming in the July sun with the joyous sound of my honey bees. All this, and for season after season, where nothing grew before!

Along with melilotus in the gravelly cuts and burnt woodlands grows the fireweed, a tall showy annual that waves its pink, plumed head throughout July. Farther north and west, this striking flower, like the melilotus, yields a heavy flow of delicious honey, but it does not attract the bees in this locality. Neither do my bees get any nectar from the fat little indigo-bush that takes possession of the unfarmed, sandy fields in July, though the wild bumblebees are busy upon it as long as it remains in bloom.

But this is not the native land of the honey bee, and it is sheer luck that the white clover, the basswood, the goldenrod, and here in July, the sumac, give down to these immigrant bees their honey-sweets.

High noon of the year! The laggard breeze comes to me now from the maple swamp, slow and sleepy with the odor of the white azaleas; a flock of chickadees stop and quiz me; the quivering click-clack of a distant mowing-machine fills the air with a drowsy hum.

Up to this time I have not seen a black snake, but now one is watching me with raised head from the edge of ferns among the rocks. One step toward him and the lifted, rigid neck, a flashing streak of jet, glides swiftly, evenly, mysteriously away, leaving me with an uncanny feeling of chill.

It, too, is a creature of the sun, as is everything that seems to belong especially to July. Smells, colors, sounds, shapes, are all sun-born. The hum of the insects, the music of the mower, the clear, strong hues of the flowers, the sweet breath of curing hay, the heavy balsamic odors of the woods,—everything seems either a distillation, a vibration, an essence, or some direct, immediate work of the sun.

Has your blood been work and winter faded until it runs thin? Would you feel the pulse of a new life? Come, we will take a day out of July and bask like the wood-lily and the snake; we will sleep for this one day in the blazing, sleeping, living, midsummer sun.