Green Valley | Page 5

little sunny hills and through still, deep woods
that you can guess the charm of it, can believe in the joyousness of it.
For Green Valley is a joyous, sweetly human old town to those who
love and understand it.
Take an early spring day when the winter's wreck and rust and
deadness seem to be everywhere. Yet here in the Green Valley roads
and streets little warm winds are straying, looking for tulip beds and
spring borders. The sunshine that elsewhere looks thin and pale drops
warmly here into back yards and ripples ever so brightly up and down

Rabbit's Hill, where the hedges are turning green and David Allan is
plowing.
The willows back of Dell Parsons' house are budding and all aquiver
with the wildly glad, full-throated warblings of robins, bluebirds,
red-winged blackbirds and bobolinks. While somewhere from the
swaying tops of last year's reeds, up from the grassy slopes of
Churchill's meadow, comes the sweet, clear call of meadow larks.
In the ditches the cushioning moss is green and through the brown
tangled weeds along Silver Creek the new grass is peeping. The sunny
clearing back of Petersen's woods will be full of mushrooms as the days
deepen. And already there are big golden dandelions in Widow Green's
orchard.
In these still, warm noons you can hear through the waiting, echoing air
the laughing shouts of playing children and the low-dropping honk of
the wild geese that in a scarcely quivering line are sailing northward
across the reedy lowlands which the gentle spring rains will turn into
soft, violet, misty marshes.
The last bit of frost has thawed out of the old Glen Road and in the
young sunshine it seems to laugh goldenly as it climbs up, up to Jim
Gray's squatty, weathered little farmhouse. The eastern windows of this
little silver-gray house are gay with blossoming house plants and across
the back dooryard, flapping gently in the spring breeze, is a line of
gayly colored bed quilts. For Martha Gray has begun her
house-cleaning.
The woodsy part of Grove Street, the part that was opened up only five
years ago and is called Lovers' Lane because it curves and winds
mysteriously through a lovely bit of woodland, is already shimmering
with the life and beauty of spring.
Down on Fern Avenue, which is a wide, grassy road and no avenue at
all, Uncle Roger Allan is carefully painting his chicken coops. Roger
Allan is a tall, twinkling, smooth-shaven old man, and he lives in a
house as twinkling and as tidy as himself. He is a bachelor, but years

ago he took little David from the dead arms of an unhappy, wild young
stepsister and has brought him up as his own. People used to know the
reasons why Roger Allan had never married but few remember now.
Here he is at any rate, painting his chicken coops and standing still
every now and then to stare off at Rabbit's Hill where his boy, tall,
sturdy David Allan, is plowing the warm, black fields.
Up in a narrow lane, at the side window of a blind-looking little house,
sits Mrs. Rosenwinkle. She is German and badly paralyzed and she
believes that the earth is flat and that if you walked far enough out
beyond Petersen's pasture you would most certainly fall off. She also
believes that only Lutherans like herself can go to heaven. But to-day,
beside the open window, with a soft, wooing, eiderdown little breeze
caressing her face, she is happy and unworried, her eyes busy with the
tender world and the two chubby grandchildren tumbling gleefully
about in the still lane.
In his little square shoe shop built out from his house Joe Baldwin is
arranging his spring stock in his two modest show windows. Joe is a
widower with two boys, a gentle voice, a gentle, wondering mind, and
a remarkable wart in the very center of his left palm. His shop is a
sunny, cheerful room with plenty of benches and chairs. The little shop
has a soft gray awning for the hot days and a wide-eyed competent
stove for cold ones. Nobody but Grandma Wentworth and such other
folks like Roger Allan ever suspect the real reason for all those
comfortable sitting-down places in Joe's shop. And Joe never tells a
soul that it is just an idea of his for keeping his own two boys and the
boys of other men under his eye. In Joe's gentle opinion the hotel and
livery barn and blacksmith shop are not exactly the best places for
young boys to frequent. But of course Joe never mentions such
opinions out loud even to the boys. He just makes his shop as inviting
and homelike as possible, keeps the daily papers handy on the