Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, May 1, 1935

May 1, 1935. Wednesday-

A brisk, cool sunshining morning. After about a twelve hour sleep I feel better. I plant the wild-flowers we got Sunday, and spread some of the rotten wood around them. This was a fine thing – the feel and the smell of the rotten wood was exhilarating. I thought, in that long ago, coming out of the Ark, and finding in the damp woods, fragile Dutchman’s Breeches, and digging one’s hands into the rich loam again, what a thrill it would be after the long monotonous trip on the boat, with nothing but water around, and you knew there was no shore anywhere in the world.

P.M. To Harbor, taking Arthur along – who makes a fine companion. It is windy & brilliant and the harbor seems full of romance – I am getting deeper & deeper into my harbor picture, and a great contentment and happiness comes.

     On the way home, we stop & get a box of candy for the May basket for Bertha – Sally & Martha, and their school-mate Marie, pick violets and tie them in little bouquets. I pick pink hyacinth & daffodils, and arrange them with the violets in the center. Then leave the rest to the children to carry out.

     When I check up in the studio, I find as I had suspected in at the harbor that it was the building and not the tower that was wrong – I indicated the changes and now it seems right – now at last I am ready to continue with the painting, left two years ago – I both dread and anticipate this largest task I have attempted.

     I dreamt quite a lot last night. Most of it is vague, but one thing remains – someone said to me “you ought to go back to those old interpretations of nature moods again” and at once I was standing on a street, near the edge of a strange town; it was raining, late Summer, and the reflections in the wet side-walk of a group of maples, seemed inexpressably [sic] beautiful and filled me with a yearning sadness, as if it were something irrevocably gone.

     I was re-reading my Sunday entry and there seemed something magical about the simple remark “we went east on Clinton beyond Marilla Rd”- The whole lake–land seemed to stretch in a long panorama bathed in a romantic evening light – at the back (west) was the smoky city with its wild wind-swept harbor of boats and gaunt elevators,- to the east, past Four-rod road, and Three-Rod road, lies the valley of Cowlesville, indistinct in the eastern twilight- already the whole county-side had the glamour of things experienced from early childhood – the very names had magic, capable of calling to mind visions of late spring evenings, excursions into the dark woods for fragile spring- flowers, ponds with teeming life, and noisy toads & frogs – In one great sweep I went from the harbor over the country side to the mysterious hill- country to the east. Even the harbor has an ancient-ness of experience, as tho I had wandered in it as a boy. A great love of all things all experience fills me tonight-

      I bought “Les Miserables” “War & Peace” and “Beethoven, the Man who Freed Music” – to fortify myself in my isolation – I am reading the last – and I realize anew what a strange unaccountable genius was Beethoven. He will never be explained.

Charles E. Burchfield, May 1, 1935