Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

28. outside world. There is the sky, above the village housetops, so vast and mysterious, full of the great loose sunlit, wind-slanted clouds that always come after a summer storm – thru it I have access to infinity and down below, very tangible, is the yard and garden and how good all the things in it seem: the luxuriant tomato-plants, now in sharp sunlight, and again in temporary shadow, when a blueish green bloom on the leaves becomes visible, young pale yellow-green tomatoes showing thru; the bed of vigorous cannae, the leaves struggling upward in whorled fashion; beyond them the crazy hap onions with their crazy haphazard growth, and the orange day-lilies; on the right in the shade of the pine-trees, the confusion of the children’s gardens with their predominating note of bouncing bet. It being Monday morning into the garden like the prow of a ship, juts a triangle of freshly washed clean-looking clothes, brilliant in the raw sunshine, cut by the slender shaft of the young birch-tree with its lacy drooping foliage. And beyond, the garage and the house and up over them into the sky again. At times the children pass thru intent on their play seemingly unconscious of my presence; sometimes a wren sings and there are the various sounds of village activities, all colored by