Friendship Village Love Stories. Gale Zona
the senses. I am always telling myself that if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think, because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the idea of something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her. But I am never quick enough to let her know....
When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,
"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.
"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."
"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.
"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.
I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would think that children would need to have things said out, but they are evidently closer to a more excellent way.
So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we are constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this which my neighbour called Togetherness.
II INSIDE JUNE
The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might not one finally become a June day?...
Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back and read there and made a path right away through the page.
This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of box-elder so close to my window that the splash of rose on his throat almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old problem: The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough.
I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the matter—or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind of spiritual taking up of a claim.
How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that is the way it seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those fugitive moments when one almost knows ... what it is all about. And with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise man; and, indeed, if one idles properly—or rather, if the proper person idles—the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle until the hour yields its full blessing.
I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter, for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon, with a family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I did, with the proper grounds.
To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy, amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment, and that she must rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what. But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I can do to resist saying to her, "How did you get away?" It was so that she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of the spirit of the village.
There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:—
Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.
Half strangers