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Charlotte Whitney (1867-1955) http://tinyurl.com/CWhitney

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After the Winter Rain

From After the Winter Rain, 1890. Read Online

Reader: Jessica Teeter

We Californians are used to sunny weather and balmy days, but we're also awed by the natural beauty that rainfall brings.

Charlotte Whitney grew into a political radical who sometimes advocated violence. However, as a young writer, she once turned to describing the beneficence of a season's first rains in the Bay Area.

"After the Winter Rain," Illustration for the Overland Monthly, March 1890. Larger.

. . . on New Years day one ought always to be able to go out and find the yellow basswood blooming on the bare twigs-twigs so tough that when you try to

Tilia americana, American Basswood or Linden leaf, photographed by Roger Griffith, 2009. Larger.

break off the little golden bit of wintry sunshine, you may twist and twist before the smooth, olive-colored bark will give way. It is a small shrub, here in the nearer Contra Costa hills, at least, strung with bright yellow bells, and very much like a garden shrub cultivated from Japan, and called "golden chain." Then a week or two later should come the flowering currant and the trilliums. All these, not "after the winter rains" but during them, if the rain will only grant little intervals long enough to get the blossoms open.

Charlotte Whitney's "After the Winter Rain" was included in the Overland Monthly published in 1890.

–Contributed by Molly McGonigle.