The column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on March 9, 1940.
No matter how tangled any thread is, if we look at a small enough part of it, it seems to lie straight.
So it is in life.
The path down to the sea, all dripping wet today with warm March rain, and set with green moss and budding trees, is a path of peace and beauty where only the calling birds and the velvet feet of squirrels break the silence.
Down on the sand, the tide is rolling in, and the gulls are circling against the stormy clouds. I like to think of a great circulation of the sea, with its deep secrets of life, unperturbed by human complication. Empires may decay and fall, but the dark blue ocean rolls on. Starfish and sea-urchins go on living just as they did in the time of Noah, eating and being eaten without mercy or regrets!
This is a real spring day, when sudden rainstorms purple Mount Douglas and come down in glittering drops, and then, as suddenly, cease when the sunshine pours out and the fields steam in its warmth.
I am going out to look at such a small area of life today that there will be no room left for tangles. The day is fair and the countryside lies about me, green and beautiful. White clouds are piling up in cathedral mountains beyond San Juan Island and one boat with an orange sail rides on the gentle waves of the straits.
I have a flower and shrub catalogue with me and I am going to sit on a log and read it from end to end, and forget the world. Real flowers are never as lovely as their pictures in the catalogue, but I put that thought away as a suggestion of evil. Who knows what this year鈥檚 growth may be?
People are always learning and getting surprises. One of our neighbours had new potatoes on New Year鈥檚 Day. He planted his seed on Sept. 1 and on New Year鈥檚 morning dug enough for a company of 11; fine, smooth-skinned potatoes, as big as lemons.
That鈥檚 the charm of the country. There is continuity in life. There are always possibilities. Something started, something growing. Something to look for!
Of course, there are disappointments.
Last year, I carefully saved every one of the anemone seed pods, letting them break open on the stem before I pulled them. Pretty seeds they are, set in white cotton. In August, I sowed them in careful rows and have watched for the little multiple leaves. But not one has come.
However, in many places of the garden, where no one planted seed or bulbs, I see them coming. Bantams! That鈥檚 what they are. They want to help in their planting.
Bantam hens do not thank anyone to make a nest for them and help them in their family cares. They simply won鈥檛 have it. They make their own nests, and come back when the chicks are out, leading their flocks, little balls of down, ready to take a bow.
No government aid for them! Not even shelter at night, for they roost in the trees, winter and summer. Perhaps they have their own co-operative guilds, but certainly accept no help from people and they thrive and multiply.
They are like the French peasants in their gallant independence, who want nothing from their government, and do not want to be administered.
They put no trust in promises. They are accustomed to fighting against the weather 鈥渨hich makes no promises, and keeps no contracts.鈥�
I have been reading an article in the Listener, by Denis Saurat, about them. He says if you took money away from the French peasants it would make no difference in their lives. They would eat the same things from their land, do the same work with their cows and horses. Their real wealth is in their grass, pigs, horses.
That鈥檚 one thing the war is doing for us. We are learning something about our brave allies!
Now that England and France are doing their buying as well as their fighting as one nation, here in 乌鸦传媒, we may yet have French taught in our schools and, in one generation, we may become truly bilingual and that would help us on our way to being a great nation.
Now, I hear, the French are asked by the people of Spain to give back the refugee children they took in during the war in Spain, and they are refusing. They are too fond of the little strangers to part with them and no doubt the boys and girls are useful now!
There! I am taking in, too, large a slice of life, and must get back to the safe shelter of the catalogue.
I will look at the shrubs. We have a place at the north of the house where no flower seems happy, and this year we are going to put in shrubs. I read about flowering cherries and here are their pictures!
鈥淭he best collection may now be seen in Washington, D.C., where the magnificent gift of the Japanese government is in full bloom.鈥� Opposite this picture is the rose tree of China in all its beauty.
In these hard, sorrowful days when we cannot sleep at night for thinking of the world鈥檚 trouble, we must sweeten our hearts with simple things like the smell of violets in the rain, and the sight of crimson berries which shine through the fog, for these are more than merely vegetable growth that can be resolved into their components parts of cholorophyll and pigment 鈥� they are tokens and signs sent to us, as the rainbow was to Noah and his family, to assure us that God has not forgotten the word.
