THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604190011
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Perry Morgan
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Carolina friends occasionally call with seasonal notes. From Spruce Pine in the very haunch of winter, I was informed that ``the Toe River is frozen from bank to bank and if a fellow had a sack big enough and the notion to do it, he could collect the whole danged thing.'' From Huntersville last week came news of a wood duck, a mallard and a Canada goose pacing together at the edge of a farm pond. ``Expectant fathers all, I'd guess,'' a friend reported, talking into the phone while watching the birds through a telescope. Her hopes are high. The wood ducks have visited the pond three years, but never nested.
After a labored birth, spring is here and things are going on as usual. And, as usual in the woods, going on too fast - the way, that is, they change from winter gray to summer green. In between, all too briefly along limbs leafing out, there's an array of tints and textures that if caught on canvas could bring awe in any season. Just in a large circle, if it includes a grape vine, one might see green beginning as red, rust, lemon, lime, aqua, pewter, silver, yellow, pink, mauve and, in the grape leaf, rose.
All these hues go together in a subtle swathing that day by day tucks from sight the parts and particulars of trees. Too soon they will become woods of a uniform shape and a uniform green - of marginal interest to an eye that, even as it delights in them, fishes in memory for spring sights and sounds that do not age.
It being spring in another time and place, the hardwood groves would be soft and charmed, edged with velvety mosses and birdfoot violets. The woodland floors glittered with light as sun, wind and clouds moved over a canopy still forming from leaves in their first surge of growth.
Birds were abundant in brush, on branches, in treetops and on the wing - tuneful and confident. Shelled corn in hand, a junior farmer sitting quietly could lure jaybirds close to the point of pecking but never more than close, or watch nestlings, making mouths of themselves, or listen as redbirds splintered stillness with throbbing song and yellowhammers drilled dead wood in search of grubs.
Or, instead, the little farmer could run barefoot on woodland paths until he encountered one of that Eden's snakes and fled thence to a field where plowing mules, with deep and steady breath, sculpted the broken, lumpy earth into rows ready to receive the guano and the seed. The field sloped down to a creek lined with alders among which reclusive rain crows made their hidden ways and their eery croaks; the field rose to a knoll around which the rows circled until at their end the mules and plowmen, for a moment, seemed transcendent. From terraces came the odor of green brush burning.
It being spring, the junior farmer might have been sent off to have his shaggy locks shorn at Ed Parks' barber shop. The shop was an hour's walk away and the haircut a day's wait. Mr. Ed, rather shaggy himself, was a barber who needed a barber, and he did not have a firm grip on his main business: Once seated and aproned in the chair, a customer might find himself abandoned as the barber needed to ``run home for a minute to see about my bees,'' or sell some onion sets or potato slips, or gab in the street with a farmer not seen since ginning time, or tend the fire that heated water for 10-cent baths he sold out back, or sit down and join in a conversation among the dozen or more people waiting for his services. At such a time, a customer once asked: ``Ed, will you take the damned towel off my face?''
``Too hot?'' Mr. Ed wondered.
``Too cold,'' replied the weary customer.
Walking home, the junior farmer would see the roadside kudzu, primroses and honeysuckle greening up; go down a little path to see the serried spears in Miss Eulalia Jones' asparagus patch, and see on all sides birds rising and settling on the ordered fields. It being spring, a mellow smell was coming to the earth and, as he imagined, perfume to the honeysuckle even before it bloomed. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB