At last the snow has melted. I went out and uncovered a piece of shady border where I found daffodils showing about five inches of yellow shoots, poor things, longing for sunlight. Spring is not yet on the ground, but it is in the sky—such tender washed skies, a pale, acute light that sets the sad, muddy earth in relief but overhead plays out a continual theater of cloud—April skies. Only the October ones (so different) move me as these do. New birds are coming to the feeder every day—yesterday purple finches. We hear the phoebes. How Cornelius loves them! It seems incredible that we have lived through the long winter, that we are really emerging into a new world at last, a world where every tender young thing can come into flower; soon it will be the maples. I feel so full of hope and energy suddenly, it’s wonderful.

Cornelius gets quite cross because I try to do too much, and I suppose he is right, but there is some sap rising in me just as it did in the maples when they were sugaring in March—and it makes me want to clean out cupboards, polish the silver, get curtains washed. “What does it matter?” says Cornelius. “The curtains have been dusty for twenty years.” “Yes,” I answer, “but we have not lived here for twenty years. We camped out in summer. Now we are living here!”

But why do I write about all this when the happening here is something entirely different and a little frightening. That hippie—or whatever he is—Joel Smith, seems to have moved in on Ellen for an indefinite time. He tried working at the sawmill but he is not cut out for hard physical work and now he helps out at the store in the mornings and on holidays and, as far as I can make out, waits for Cathy to get home from school in the afternoon. Ellen complains but does nothing to make him go. The fact is that he and Nick have become friends, and that is certainly a good thing for Nick. But how long can Joel keep the news from his parents that he is not a Dartmouth student? Cathy says he plans to tell them soon. He has a stepfather who seems to be rather hard to persuade of anything not absolutely “square”—and who would surely shudder, from what Cathy says, at Willard and whatever it represents to this rather lost character. We invited him to supper. Cornelius and Eben have a real specimen now to examine, in regard to all that reading they have been doing of Marcuse and whoever the other people are this generation goes for.