(Nature should be capitalized, just like God; They are, after all, the same thing, aren’t They?) Now and then Harry gets ambitious and buys a tree and plants it, and generally it lives, and each spring I tend to buy what nurserymen call bedding plants and bed them down hither and yon. These are annuals, which is as well, so that when they die, as they rather often do, I can comfort myself with the thought that they would have died anyway, come fall. I also, each fall, plant some bulbs. Never as many as I buy, though. And come spring fewer come up than I ’ve planted.

That morning, in middle March, I was especially conscious of Nature and all Her works. The winter had been a harsh one, and a lingering one, and in the country we feel weather and seasonal change far more acutely than we ever did in the city. Now the weather had bite to it yet, but was softening, warming. Crocuses were up, and snowdrops, and other cheery things whose names I never knew. The forsythia-we have acres of forsythia-were blindingly gold all over the place. Forsythia is so boring eleven months out of the year, and every March it makes my heart stop.

And so I walked, down the long flagstone path (between the stones of which I each year resolve to plant creeping thyme, and each year don’t) to the road below, where our mailbox keeps its lonely sentinel watch. I do not mean to be arch; it was the sort of crisp morning when one would think in such soaring phrases.

It was a Tuesday, I remember. We get little mail on Tuesdays. Most letters, whether local junk mail or correspondence from New York, takes either two or three days to reach us, so Tuesdays typically bring those letters mailed on Saturdays or Sundays, and few are. There was a supermarket slinger, and some drivel from the nonentity who represents us in Congress. And there was an envelope postmarked Las Vegas, the stationery of some unfamiliar hotel, with my name and address neatly typed on it.