"Ver aspergit terram floribus. . ."

The flurry of activity around the Dolls' house is a sure sign that spring has come. Billy has brought in a tub full of flowers, and Beauty is waiting to arrange them after Lucinda gets through mopping the kitchen floor. But little Beau is taking his first steps, and nobody wants to disturb him.

There's a lot of redecorating going on, as well as spring cleaning. The girls' room has got new curtains, but the beds are still being stripped and measured for new mattresses.

Mama Doll is proud of the new chair seats and the little matching settee she had made to go by the front door. It can be shifted over to seat two more at the dining table when needed.

New curtains in the bedroom--and they're hard to see, but the bathroom window has green-and-blue wooden blinds. Mama herself is sporting a new spring outfit. Peter is still cuddled under his faux leopard blankie, but someone will take him out in the garden later in the morning, when he is washed and dressed.

*

 If this uncertain age in which we dwell

Were really as dark as I hear sages tell,

And I convinced that they were really sages,

I should not curse myself with it to hell,

But leaving not the chair I long have sat in,

I should betake me back ten thousand pages

To the world's undebatably dark ages,

And getting up my medieval Latin, . . .

I'd say, "O master of the Palace school,

You were not Charles' nor anybody's fool:

Tell me, as pedagogue to pedagogue,

You did not know that since King Charles did rule,

You had no chance but to be minor, did you?

Your light was spent perhaps as in a fog,

That at once kept you burning low and hid you;. . .

"Yet, singing but Dione in the wood,

Or Ver aspergit terram floribus,

[You] slowly led old Latin verse to rhyme

And to forget the ancient lengths of time,

And so began the modern world for us."

From "The Lesson For Today," by Robert Lee Frost