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Authors: Rose Macaulay
Tags: Personal Pleasures
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of an adventure. The angelus ringing across the bay; hens clucking; the lisping and hissing of tiny waves on sand; the late afternoon soaking hills and shore with golden heat. Gliding in to shore with the ripples, stepping out into warm, knee-deep water, dragging the canoe until she rests on dry beach. Voices that plain like gullsââItâs not fair, taking her out alone and keeping her out all that time. Weâre going a voyage to the rocks. â¦â
Chasing Fireflies
Each midsummer eve, after dark, we would go a firefly walk. The way started through a little orto, where a vine trellis arched over a shadowed path, and orange and lemon-trees bordered it, standing against white walls and filling the velvet night with sweetness, as the frogs in every little reservoir and ditch filled it with melody. Beyond the orto, the path climbed up between terraces, where the olive trees cast delicate black shadows on the moonlit stairway, and orange and lemon groves still perfumed the night. Among them, and all about the myrtle shrubs and juniper and little pines, capered and leaped the fireflies, flying between the cold moon and the earth. They pranced and danced, they twinked and blinked, they sparked, they larked, they burned like flying stars, like leaping gems, and after them we sped beneath a huge golden moon, scrambling up rocks, jumping down terraces, plunging scratched hands into juniper bushes, standing still against sticky pine-trunks to tempt the brilliant creatures near. Too rarely our cupped hands closed on a spark and held it, while it blinked at us shyly, on and off, like a lighthouse. Not to all was it given to catch a firefly; it was an event, a triumph; to hold one was to hold a magicking imp, that nowburnt like a star, now darkly brooded, a sullen insect without joy.
âIf you find any pretty insects, keep them in a box,â Dr. Browne of Norwich wrote to his son in France. So also did we desire to do. But authority was against us; we were given to understand that in boxes our fireflies would pine, extinguish, and die. So we released the lucent sparks; they fled to join the host of dancing candles that bespangled the hills.
In the midsummer moonlight, with enormous golden stars empatining a violet sky, and these tiny bright ones skipping among black shadows about the lemon-sweet, frog-sung mountains, the world on St. Johnâs Eve was incredible yet familiar, like worlds known in dreams.
But they never would let us stay out in it all night.
Christmas Morning
Christmas woke me early, in the small dark hours, as if someone had touched me on the shoulder and said, Wake up, wake up, itâs Christmas. I woke up and it was dark, and would not be Christmas for hours. I crawled to the foot of the bed, to where it hung on the painted iron bedrail, the large woollen stocking that had yawned so emptily overnight, but now so stiffly, bulkily, swollenly bulged. It might not be opened until daylight, but I felt it outside, pinching and poking its various protuberances, from the square cornery one above the knee to the round one in the toe that might be an orange or a glass witchball. Shivers of ecstasy curdled my blood as I fingered and felt; my hair stared, my skin goosed, my pulses hammered in heart and head. It was Christmas Day. However often I whispered it, I could scarcely credit so strange, so preposterous, so heavenly a fact. Christmas Day had indeed arrived. But how could it really, actually, in point of fact, have come, and I in bed as usual, in the same red flannel pyjamas as on any other night? Yet Christmas Day must come; one had long expected it, and here it was. Perhaps it was a dream.
But of a sudden the still dark was shaken and shattered and a-clamour with bells. Not the gay sweetchiming of an English church peal, but harsh, clanging, iron, tremendous, a very roar and tumult of noise. The great Roman brick tower of Sant Ambrogio in the large piazza outside the windows, the striped
Chasing Fireflies
Each midsummer eve, after dark, we would go a firefly walk. The way started through a little orto, where a vine trellis arched over a shadowed path, and orange and lemon-trees bordered it, standing against white walls and filling the velvet night with sweetness, as the frogs in every little reservoir and ditch filled it with melody. Beyond the orto, the path climbed up between terraces, where the olive trees cast delicate black shadows on the moonlit stairway, and orange and lemon groves still perfumed the night. Among them, and all about the myrtle shrubs and juniper and little pines, capered and leaped the fireflies, flying between the cold moon and the earth. They pranced and danced, they twinked and blinked, they sparked, they larked, they burned like flying stars, like leaping gems, and after them we sped beneath a huge golden moon, scrambling up rocks, jumping down terraces, plunging scratched hands into juniper bushes, standing still against sticky pine-trunks to tempt the brilliant creatures near. Too rarely our cupped hands closed on a spark and held it, while it blinked at us shyly, on and off, like a lighthouse. Not to all was it given to catch a firefly; it was an event, a triumph; to hold one was to hold a magicking imp, that nowburnt like a star, now darkly brooded, a sullen insect without joy.
âIf you find any pretty insects, keep them in a box,â Dr. Browne of Norwich wrote to his son in France. So also did we desire to do. But authority was against us; we were given to understand that in boxes our fireflies would pine, extinguish, and die. So we released the lucent sparks; they fled to join the host of dancing candles that bespangled the hills.
In the midsummer moonlight, with enormous golden stars empatining a violet sky, and these tiny bright ones skipping among black shadows about the lemon-sweet, frog-sung mountains, the world on St. Johnâs Eve was incredible yet familiar, like worlds known in dreams.
But they never would let us stay out in it all night.
Christmas Morning
Christmas woke me early, in the small dark hours, as if someone had touched me on the shoulder and said, Wake up, wake up, itâs Christmas. I woke up and it was dark, and would not be Christmas for hours. I crawled to the foot of the bed, to where it hung on the painted iron bedrail, the large woollen stocking that had yawned so emptily overnight, but now so stiffly, bulkily, swollenly bulged. It might not be opened until daylight, but I felt it outside, pinching and poking its various protuberances, from the square cornery one above the knee to the round one in the toe that might be an orange or a glass witchball. Shivers of ecstasy curdled my blood as I fingered and felt; my hair stared, my skin goosed, my pulses hammered in heart and head. It was Christmas Day. However often I whispered it, I could scarcely credit so strange, so preposterous, so heavenly a fact. Christmas Day had indeed arrived. But how could it really, actually, in point of fact, have come, and I in bed as usual, in the same red flannel pyjamas as on any other night? Yet Christmas Day must come; one had long expected it, and here it was. Perhaps it was a dream.
But of a sudden the still dark was shaken and shattered and a-clamour with bells. Not the gay sweetchiming of an English church peal, but harsh, clanging, iron, tremendous, a very roar and tumult of noise. The great Roman brick tower of Sant Ambrogio in the large piazza outside the windows, the striped
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