March 25, 1928
handmade cardboard notebook
13 3/8 x 12 3/8
Gift of the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation, 2000
Mar. 25 1928
To Hamburg & country nearby walking.
A dark, heavy-skied day, rain always on the point of falling – at first seeming sullen & ominous.
Missing car, walk. A vast barrenness – distances obscured in thick opaque mists
Picked up by two red-cheeked boys in an old roadster. It pleased me that they would ask me to crowd in with them for no apparent reason other than to be accommodating.
They drop me at Orchard Park Junction. Shortly thereafter street-car comes.
Cross bridge on south side Hamburg & follow little used road east. A vague darkness is settling over the earth; it is no longer sullen, but deeply mysterious. Barking of dogs – early spring call of blue-birds.
Leave road & cross fields to woods. The earth is vast, loose, soggy, I sink in with each step it is a wonderful feeling – the spirit becomes loose and expands.
The growth of tall rain-blackened pine-trees in a little ravine. A great feeling of the existence & closeness of a creator came over me, & I stood there in a reverie that was a bitter mixture of pain & sorrow, joy & exaltation; the inexplicable sweet sadness of spring. From some door-yard a robin sang; and from afar came the whistle of a locomotive
Pursue my way thru the roads crossing two ravines. Downward slope leaving woods & come out on flat open fields by the creek. The waters had been much higher & had left a deposit of rich yellowish sand on the fields, which were cut by the writing curves of the stream. The fields were flat & smooth, the uniform banks, purplish brown, & in shadow a vague afterglow in the cold misty western sky. There was a stark severity and austerity about it all that was overbearing – the yellow sands [gave me] a feeling of [illegible] evening glow; the water