Parasols

FROM my high porch, I looked down on Oneida Street, and saw the enameled cars flash past. Ladies, too wealthy and too idle, leaned back upon their cushions. They rode very fast, and looked quite hard and bright. Despite the elegance of the thoroughfare, ‘garish’ was the word that persisted in my mind; and the letters in the name of the street kept juggling themselves stubbornly inside my eyes, until they spelled the ‘Street of One-idea.’

I turned to my book for other ideas.

When I looked up again, a gray cloud was over all the sky that the city had, and thick drops hit smartly on the asphalt, to leap back up again like tiny dancing men.

And out of a near-by cross-street, came airily floating — a purple parasol.

Time was when an umbrella was a dank, rheumatic thing, smelling of wet black dye, and suggestive of soaked feet and cold-in-the-head. Its canopy was of funereal black cloth, and its rusty wires drooped gloomily under the downpour of the rain. Hidden in mouldy closets under the stairs, it became a necessity in time of storm, an embarrassment when the sun shone again. You never wanted to buy one.

To be sure, there have been lovely parasols in years gone by: ruffled confections of lace; but they were furniture that belonged with seventeen-year-olds and rosebudded Leghorn hats and garden parties. One spat of these lug drops could send them scurrying.

But this brave canopy is of crisp silk and strong. Its hue is richest when wettest, a royal color. Surely the agelost secret of the Tyrian mollusks has been brought up again, dripping from the purple seas. And here arc no such ribs as yielded dispiritedly and brokenly to the onslaught of the flood. This parasol has saucily put up its back, and there underneath is a level-ceilinged space, with only a concession of a narrow width of purple eaves.

Even as that purple splendor moves away, down the double avenue of trees, on some princess errand to the heart of the city, a scarlet one, jauntily alive, is ‘blown out like a thin red bubble of blood,’ bright as any inverted tulip, on the sidewalk. All its points are tipped with ivory in that exquisite fashion of the waxwing’s coral decorations. How different from the horn and bone monstrosities that we remember is the ivory ring of the handle, all delicately chased! Such a parasol cannot but add to the tripping spirit of the gray silk ankles which visibly own it.

Next, a green, all softly bright, walks with a brown, the beautiful brown of wet dead leaves. Crimson and King’s blue and henna — how new an idea and how fine, to carry the prettiest and brightest into dullness and deluge. I lean out to watch, until the ‘minute drops from off the eaves’ slide down my neck, and I like it. For when I lean so, the scent of the rain on lawns and thick leafage, and the liquid noises of runnels at the curb, come up, and immediately that misanthrope of a word, ‘garish,’is washed clean out of my consciousness, and the misty street smells — bosky!

What a word to use on our street! And with that fresh and woodsy word, many parasol shapes come sweetly before me: the half-opened parasols of the earliest buckeye leaves; the filmy circlet of the lace of Queen Anne; the great green lily pad, to shelter the great green frog. Vividly there appear the coveys of mandrake or May-apple umbrellas, which used to rise on sunny glades of the woods, or even under the orchard trees. We carried them solemnly aslant, as shelter from the sun. Little more shelter did they give than shadow for a child’s pink ear. I see the waxen beauty of the flower-lady, whose shy face was discovered only when you boldly uptipped her parasol, as you would never dare to tip-tilt this green one just passed, to gaze enough into the flowerface hidden there.

The umbrella motif leads us far — to the flat and pungent circles of the nasturtium leaf. Fit shelter is that for a selfish elf. The handle is set too cunningly to one side, so that, while the owner goes dry, any wayfarer, taken in by offer of asylum, can take the drip on the far and narrow side.

Yet what, an intriguing touch of style did a nasturtium parasol add to the costume of a dolly made of a very young ear of corn, filched from the garden rows!

But, best, of all, to live once more through an early August morning, in a hillside pasture, where overnight mists from the great Ohio have risen, to veil the miracle of the springing of the meadow mushrooms through the sweetsmelling mould.

Not many birds are singing thus early in the morning, and thus late in the summer. Only one warbler is close at hand, very lively over the gleaning of his breakfast. His song is snappysweet, like a line of happy children cracking the whip, so that the last gav child is whipped off laughing into the daisies. His last gay note is whipped off so, into space.

All the gorgeous midsummer flowers become pastel-tinted under the dew — joe-pye weed and ironweed, self-heal and mullein and ox-eyed daisies. The hyssop, as always, is a strange, cpiiet little plant, ever subdued, since with its wisp of flowers the blood was sprinkled on the lintels of those doors in Egypt which the Angel of Death passed by. The patterned cobwebs hang jeweled on every bush; and not too commonly, but here and there, the sod has opened to the pushing tips of the fat umbrellas we seek. Incredible as it may seem, sometimes the plumpest of the little fellows pop so impetuously that they fly out of the hands of whatever burrowing creature is hoisting them, and fall ownerless upon the earth. Oh, the melting, fluted pink of the lining, and the milky loose skin above, so ready to curl back and off. So firm of flesh, so delicate, so eatable! To be gathered toward the daintiest breakfast ever enjoyed since manna fell straight from the harvest-fields of Paradise, and was garnered in the dawn.

How wistful we grow, remembering them, and how we come back to teatime in Oneida Street with a hollow hunger for meadow mushrooms that are not, stewed gently in country cream that cannot be.