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March is a month when the needle of my nature dips toward the country. I am away, greeting everything as it wakes out of a winter sleep,stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet after goblet of young sunshine. I must find the dark green snowdrop and sometimes help to remove from her head, as she lifts it slowly from her couch, the frosted nightcap which the old nurse would insist that she should wear.
But most I love to see Nature do her spring house-cleaning in Kentucky, with the rain clouds for her water buckets, and the wind for her brooms. What an amount of drenching and sweeping she can do in a day! How she dashes pailfuls into every dirty corner, till the whole earth is as clean as a new floor!
Another day she attacks the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October, and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be sunned and aired. Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will go into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife would brush down cobwebs.
This done, she begins to hang up soft, new curtains at the forest windows and to spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such as no mortal looms could ever have woven.
And then, at last, she sends out invitations through the South for the birds to come and spend the summer in Kentucky. The invitations are sent out in March, and accepted April and May, and by June her house is full of visitors.
( James Lane Allen )
James Lane Allen (1849-1925) is a native of the South, having been born on a farm near Lexington, Kentucky. He was educated at Transylvania University, and for a time was Professor of Latin and English at Bethany College, West Virginia, but since 1886 he has devoted himself entirely to
literature. He has written many interesting stories and novels, among which are The Blue Grass Region and Other Sketches of Kentucky and The Kentucky Cardinal, from which “Spring in Kentucky” is taken.
cranny : a very small space or crevice
emerald : a green, precious stone
Answer the following questions.
1) How do plants “stretch arms upward and legs downward”?
2) How does “Nature do her spring house cleaning”?
3) What does nature do after her house cleaning?
4) Who does she send invitations to?
5) When are these invitations accepted?