youth in Maine, and the long white winters and the sleigh-rides;
and the tapping of the maple-trees in Spring; and the nutting
parties in the fall of the year. I think that she likes to remember
all this; and I love to hear her, for it reminds me of what my
father used to tell me of his youth; and I love especially to hear
of the trailing arbutus, that lovely little flower that grows
beneath the snow; how one brushes back the snow in early Spring and
finds the waxen, sweet, pink flowers and dark, shining leaves under
it. And I always imagine that it is a doubled nostalgia that I feel
and that my mother's Norway in Spring was like it, with snow and
wet woods. There is a line that brings it all over me: 'In May,
when sea-winds pierced our solitudes.' It is by Emerson. The Spring
here is very lovely, too, but it has not the sweetness that arises
from snow and a long winter. Through the whole winter the fuchsias
keep their green against the white walls of the little village,
huddled in between the headlands at the edge of the sea beneath us.
You know this country, don't you? The cliffs are so beautiful. I
love best the great headlands towards the Lizard, black rock or
grey, all spotted with rosettes of orange lichen with sweeps of
grey-green sward sloping to them. Victor becomes quite intoxicated
with the wind on these heights and goes in circles round and round,
like a puppy. Later on, all the slopes are veiled in the delicate
little pink thrift, and the stone walls are festooned with white
campion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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