 
jess sat in the kitchen at the long table by the west window where in 
winter he kept his grafting tools: the thin-bladed knife, the paper sweet with 
the smell of beeswax and the resin, the boxes of roots and scions. 
jess was a nurseryman and spring meant for him not only spirits" 
flowering, but the earth"s. 
a week more of moderate weather and he"d be out, still in gum boots, but 
touching an earth that had thawed, whose riches were once again fluid enough 
to be sucked upward, toward those burgeonings which by summer would have 
swelled into early harvests, permains, and sweet bows. 
spring's a various season, jess thought, no two years the same: comes in 
with rains, mud deep enough to swallow horse and rider; comes in cold, snow 
falling so fast it weaves a web; comes in with a warm wind blowing about thy 
ears and bringing a smell of something flowering, not here, but southaways, 
across the ohio, maybe, in kentucky. 
nothing here now but a smell of melting snow, which is no smell at all, 
but a kind of prickle in the nose, like a bygone sneeze. 
comes in so various, winter put by and always so welcome. 
"and us each spring so much the same." 
"thee speaking to me, jess?" 
"nothing thee"d understand, eliza." 
spring made jess discontented with the human race, and with women, if 
anything, more than men. 
it looked as if spring put them all in the shade: the season so 
resourceful and they each year meeting it with nothing changed from last year, 
digging up roots from the same sassafras thicket, licking sulfur and molasses 
from the big-bowled spoon. 
