The first spring day! The first whole day of sunshine warm soft after a spotty'and gloomy winter! The boys and I spent afternoon together We raked a section of the yard, hauled some trash in the little wagon, and had a bonfire. We walked around the garden found rhuharb just beginning to swell through the ground, all curly and red. The winter onions had tried valiantly to grow and had apparently discouraged several times, but they show up bravely green, nevertheless.
On the baby Dorothy Perkins rose we found tiny red buds getting ready to grow. The other roses are on the verge of drawing a breath of life, The iris clumps are pushing their blunt green way through the ground, and the buds of the three-year-old lilac are swelling till they are like to burst. We couldn't find a trace of the crocus though we hunted a long while, nor of the peonies either. We found a bird's nest caught in the raspberry bushes, apparently out of the gnarled old hackberry tree.
Raid Lumber Pile
When the passive enjoyment of the beauties of nature began to pall, as it sometimes seems to do on masculine minds, the boys and I raided the lumber pile and found some packing boxes. Now for mother undertaking any sort of "manual training is like venturing into uncharted seas: but we mothers have to venture much! So we got our hammers made two very presentable garden seats from the garden crates in which the sink and wash basin were shipped. It only required the inserting of a few nails, but we feel all the glow of creation! Then on another crate we nailed broad, thin boards and made a table. "Oh" sighed the impractical feminine member of the party when it was done, "what a charming tea-table!" "Why, mother!" answered the practical masculine two-thirds in astonishment, it's a carpenter's bench!" And as Ruth remarked when she came home from school, with the judicial logic which she inherits from her daddy, "Well, it is really better so; because they couldn't have tea parties much of the time, but, using it for a bench, they'll remember not to pound things on the dining room table any more!"
So the three of them are pounding nails in and out of boards and making a new sand box, while I write to you, and daddy has promised us some red barn paint to "beautify" with tomorrow.
Ruth says she saw three bees today!
Hope:
MEMORY GEM
Oh, be not the first to discover
The blot on the name of a friend,
Or the flaw in the faith of a lover
Whose heart may prove true int the end. -Selected.