Letters of Spring

On this day in 1922, writer E.B. White wrote to his mother from Columbus, Ohio. He and a friend were on a road trip to Seattle, and he was writing to congratulate his parents on their wedding anniversary. He said:

"Spring has arrived in Ohio. This is a flat state where red pigs graze in bright green fields and where farms are neat and prosperous — not like New York farms. We roll along through dozens of villages and cities whose names we never heard… Sheep come drifting up long green lawns where poplars throw interminable shadows, come drifting up and stand like statues beneath white plum blossoms, while far down the land and off in the fields a little Ford tractor moves like a snail across the furrows. Lilacs are in full bloom and the lavender ironwood blossoms are coloring all the roads."

On this day in 1934, two weeks after the publication of his novel Tender is the Night,novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his wife, Zelda, who was institutionalized for schizophrenia. He wrote to her:
"The chances that the spring, that's for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too — the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and — I find it to be you and you only. The good things and the first years together, and the good months that we had two years ago in Montgomery will stay with me forever, and you should feel like I do that they can be renewed, if not in a new spring, then in a new summer. I love you my darling, my darling."