THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504070001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Perry Morgan
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
It being April in that other time and place, the little world of the farm was being refurbished, and the winter silence of it broken softly by the peep and cheep of birds. And also by mules snuffling and snorting and sucking deep breaths as they pulled the turning plows that opened the earth and buried the litter of last year's crops.
The fallow time was over. Order and energy were emerging and seed time nearing; indeed, in cold frames under glass, seedlings already were shouldering upward. And in gardens, store-bought cabbages and onions were buried up to their necks, set early to make the most of warm days.
These were on and off. Steady warmth that worked its way into the earth and caused quick sprouting was a month away. In the old cotton South, spring did not come to the door. You might have seen a scattering of jonquils, but never a host. Around most farm houses, there were more asparagus than flower beds. Trellised kudzu as shade for porches was in vogue, and there might have been clumps of lilacs along the rims of swept-sand yards. But for beauty one looked mainly to the woods and was not disappointed.
By mid-April, the gray of hardwood groves had given way to a reddish haze which changed briefly into tints of autumn - russet and yellow gold - as the new leaves eared out. These had lacelike delicacy equal to any flower, and the play of the sun upon a greening wood was mystical.
At just such a time, the dogwood bloomed, making layers of white upon flat limbs gently curtsying. From a distance, walking barefoot on a scraped road, a junior farmer might have seen the blooms as clouds that got too low or as smoke from a grass field being burned off to make a patch for melons.
It being April, he might also have seen redbud leaning out at the edge of the woods, but he would not have known that any painter who could have got just right the red, the green, the gold and the white would have been famed forever.
The road went on to a place where birdfoot violets bunched and bloomed profusely out of red-clay banks, their roots buried deeply in a soil from which they could not be moved and made to live though farm folk, bewitched by the blossoms, kept on trying.
Off this road turned other, smaller ones no wider than wagons that served to connect fields. They were hand-hewn tracks, cut through woods with saws, picks and shovels. Under blackjack oaks the soil was poor, bare and ribbed with surface roots, but it was there in April that a rich upholstery of mosses greened and thickened into fabrics finer than any seen in farm or village houses.
There were not really fabrics, of course, and not thick either - but the thinnest of membranes. The eye was eager for the illusion, though; chipmunks played and snakes slithered over the mosses and sometimes fledglings tottered there, needing a lift back into the nest.
The mosses were primitive as, in many ways, was the cotton South; but in April, along every road and path, there was elegance unexcelled, admired and gathered into memory. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB