Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, February 15, 1921

I took a bicycle ride tonight. A balmy spring day had tortured me out of all inclination to work. I paused several miles north of Garfield and rested in a field of dry grass.

The smell of newly-green sapling bark that has been cut came on the wind out of the south, a restless wind that blew out of the stars, where the Great Betelgeuse is. The dappled moonlit sky recalled muddy pussy-willows, swirling streams, and mud-spattered boys with wild hair, running with dogs through rattling swamp grass. All the old desires are reborn tonight. The innocent desire of childhood for new spring flowers; the nomadic longings of adolescence, the desire for idyllic love that comes to youths—all are reborn and mingled with the more prosaic mundane longing of manhood, that is born of the old necessities of the earth.

Charles E. Burchfield, February 15, 1921, Salem, Ohio