The Lay of the Land

Here on the farm the signs of coming winter are not ominous signs. The pensive, mellowing days of early autumn have been preparing the garden and your mind for the shock of the first frost. Once past this and winter is welcome; it becomes a physical, spiritual need. The blood reddens at the promise of it; the soul turns comfortingly in and finds itself; and the digging of the potatoes commences, and the shocking of the corn, the picking of the apples, the piling up on the sunny side of the barn of the big golden squashes.

A single golden squash holds over almost enough of the summer to keep a long winter away from the farm; and the six of them in the attic, filling the rafter room with sunshine, never allow the hoary old monarch to show more than his face at the skylight. Pie is not the only thing one brings in with his winter squashes. He stores the ripe September in their wrinkled rinds, rinds that are ridged and bossy with the summer’s gold.

To dig one’s own potatoes! to shock one’s own corn! to pick one’s own apples! to pile one’s own squashes at one’s own barn! It is like filling one’s system with an antitoxin before going into a fever-plagued country. One is immune to winter after this, provided he stays to bake his apples in his own wood fire. One works himself into a glow with all this digging, and picking, and piling that lasts until warm weather comes again; and along with this harvest glow comes stealing over him the after-harvest peace. It is the serenity of Indian summer, the mood of the after-harvest season, upon him, – upon him and his fields and woods.

The stores are all in: the acorns have ripened and lie hidden where the squirrels will forget some of them, but where none of the forgotten will forget to grow; the winged seeds of the asters have drifted down the highways, over the hillsides and meadows; the birds are gone; the muskrats’ lodge is all but finished; the hickories and the leaf-hid hepaticas are budded against the coming spring. All is ready, all is safe, – the stores are all in. Quiet and a golden peace lie warm upon the fields. It is Indian summer.

Such a mood is a necessary condition for the cure. Such a mood is the cure, indeed, for such a mood means harmony with earth and sky, and every wind that blows. In all his physical life man is as much a part of Nature, and as subject to her inexorable laws, as the fields and the trees and the birds. I have seen a maple growing out of the pavement of a city street, but no such maple as stands yonder at the centre of my neighbor’s meadow. I lived and grew on the same street with the maple; but not as I live and grow here on the farm. Only on a farm does a man live in a normal, natural environment, only here can he comply with all the demands of Nature, can he find a cure for winter.

To Nature man is just as precious as a woodchuck or a sparrow, but not more. She cares for the woodchuck as long as he behaves like a woodchuck; so she cares for the sparrow, the oyster, the orchid, and for man. But he must behave like a natural man, must live where she intended him to live, and at the approach of winter he must neither hibernate nor migrate, for he is what the naturalists call a “winter resident.” It is not in his nature to fly away nor to go to sleep, but, like the red squirrel and the muskrat, to prepare to live up all the winter. So his original, unperverted animal instinct leads him to store.

Long ago he buried his provisions in pits and hung them up on poles. Even his vocabulary he gathered together as his word-hoard. He is still possessed of the remnant of the instinct; he will still store. Cage him in a city, give him more than he needs for winter, relieve him of all possibility of want, and yet he will store. You cannot cage an instinct nor eradicate it. It will be obeyed, if all that can be found in the way of pit and pole be a grated vault in the deep recesses of some city bank.

Cage a red squirrel and he will store in the cage; so will the white-footed mouse. Give the mouse more than he can use, put him in a cellar, where there is enough already stored for a city of mice, and he will take from your piles and make piles of his own. He must store or be unhappy and undone.

A white-footed mouse got into my cellar last winter and found it, like the cellar of the country mouse in the fable, —

Full benely stuffit, baith but and ben,
Of beirris and nuttis, peis, ry and quheit —

all of it, ready stored, so that,

Quhen ever scho list scho had aneuch to eit.

Enough to eat? Certainly; but is enough to eat all that a mouse wants? So far from being satisfied with mere meat was this particular mouse, that finding herself in the cellar in the midst of plenty, she at once began to carry my winter stores from where I had put them, and to make little heaps for herself in every dark cranny and corner of the cellar. A pint, or less, of “nuttis” – shagbarks – she tucked away in the toe of my hunting boot. The nuts had been left in a basket in the vegetable cellar; the boots stood out by the chimney in the furnace room, and there were double doors and a brick partition wall between. No matter. Here were the nuts she had not yet stored, and out yonder was the hole, smooth and deep and dark, to store them in. She found a way past the partition wall.

Every morning I shook those nuts out of my boot and sent them rattling over the cellar floor. Every night the mouse gathered them up and put them snugly back into the toe of the boot. She could not have carried more than one nut at a time, – up the tall boot-leg and down the oily, slippery inside. I should have liked to see her scurrying about the cellar, looking after her curiously difficult harvest. Apparently, they were new nuts to her every evening. Once or twice I came down to find them lying untouched. The mouse, perhaps, was away over night on other business. But the following night they were all gathered and nicely packed in the boot as before. And as before I sent them sixty ways among the barrels and boxes of the furnace room. But I did it once too often, for it dawned upon the mouse one night that these were the same old nuts that she had gathered now a dozen times; and that night they disappeared. Where? I wondered. Weeks passed, and I had entirely forgotten about the nuts, when I came upon them, the identical nuts of my boot, tiered carefully up in a corner of the deep, empty water-tank away off in the attic.

Store? The mouse had to store. She had to, not to feed her body, – there was plenty in the cellar for that, – but to satisfy her soul. A mouse’s soul, that something within a mouse which makes for more than meat, may not be a soul at all, but only a bundle of blind instincts. The human soul, that thing whose satisfaction is so often a box of chocolates and a silk petticoat, may be better and higher than the soul of a mouse, may be a different thing indeed; but originally it, too, had simple, healthful instincts; and among them, atrophied now, but not wholly gone, may still be found the desire for a life that is more than something to eat and something to put on.

To be sure, here on the farm, one may eat all of his potatoes, his corn, his beans and squashes before the long, lean winter comes to an end. But if squashes to eat were all, then he could buy squashes, bigger, fairer, fatter ones, and at less cost, no doubt, at the grocery store. He may need to eat the squash, but what he needs more, and cannot buy, is the raising of it, the harvesting of it, the fathering of it. He needs to watch it grow, to pick it, to heft it, and have his neighbor heft it; to go up occasionally to the attic and look at it. He almost hates to eat it.

A man may live in the city and buy a squash and eat it. That is all he can do with a boughten squash; for a squash that he cannot raise, he cannot store, nor take delight in outside of pie. And can a man live where his garden is a grocery? his storehouse a grocery? his bins, cribs, mows, and attics so many pasteboard boxes, bottles, and tin cans? Tinned squash in pie may taste like any squash pie; but it is no longer squash; and is a squash nothing if not pie? Oh, but he gets a lithograph squash upon the can to show him how the pulp looked as God made it. This is a sop to his higher sensibilities; it is a commercial reminder, too, that life even in the city should be more than pie, – it is also the commercial way of preserving the flavor of the canned squash, else he would not know whether he were eating squash or pumpkin or sweet potato. But then it makes little difference, all things taste the same in the city, – all taste of tin.

There is a need in the nature of man for many things, – for a wife, a home, children, friends, and a need for winter. The wild goose feels it, too, and no length of domesticating can tame the wild desire to fly when the frosts begin to fall; the woodchuck feels it; carry him to the tropics and still he will sleep as though the snows of New England lay deep in the mouth of his burrow. The partridge’s foot broadens at the approach of winter into a snowshoe; the ermine’s fur turns snow-white. Winter is in their bones; it is good for them; it is health, not disease – with snowshoes provided and snow-colored fur.

Nature supplies her own remedies. Winter brings its own cure, – snowshoes and snowy coats, short days and long nights, the narrowed round, the widened view, the open fire, leisure, quiet, and the companionship of your books, your children, your wife, your own strange soul – here on the farm.

Where else does it come, bringing all of this? Where else are conditions such that all weather is good weather? The weather a man needs? Here he is planted like his trees; his roots are in the soil; the changing seasons are his life. He feeds upon them; works with them; rests in them; yields to them, and finds in their cycle more than the sum of his physical needs.

A man lives quite without roots in a city, like some of the orchids, hung up in the air; or oftener, like the mistletoe, rooted, but drawing his life parasitically from some simpler, stronger, fresher life planted far below him in the soil. There he cannot touch the earth and feed upon life’s first sources. He knows little of any kind but bad weather. Summer is hot, winter is nasty, spring and autumn scarcely are at all, for they do not make him uncomfortable. The round year is four changes of clothes – and a tank-sprinkled, snow-choked, smoke-clouded, cobble-paved, wheel-wracked, street-scented, wire-lighted half-day, half-night something, that is neither spring, summer, autumn, nor winter.

A city is a sore on the face of Nature; not a dangerous, ugly sore, necessarily, if one can get out of it often enough and far enough, but a sore, nevertheless, that Nature will have nothing kindly to do with. The snows that roof my sheds with Carrara, that robe my trees with ermine, that spread close and warm over my mowing, that call out the sleds and the sleigh-bells, fall into the city streets as mud, as danger on the city roofs, – as a nuisance over the city’s length and breadth, a nuisance to be hauled off and dumped into the harbor as fast as shovels and carts can move it.

But you cannot dump your winter and send it off to sea. There is no cure for winter in a tip-cart; no cure in the city. There is consolation in the city, for there is plenty of company in the misery. But company really means more of the misery. If life is to be endured, if all that one can do with winter is to shovel it and suffer it, then to the city for the winter, for there one’s share of the shoveling is small, and the suffering there seems very evenly distributed.

Here on the farm is neither shoveling nor suffering, no quarrel whatever with the season. Here you have nothing to do with its coming or going further than making preparation to welcome it and to bid it farewell. You slide, instead, with your boys; you do up the chores early in the short twilight, pile the logs high by the blazing chimney and – you remember that there is to be a lecture to-night by the man who has said it all in his book; there is to be a concert, a reception, a club dinner, in the city, sixteen blissful miles away, – and it is snowing! You can go if you have to. But the soft tapping on the window-panes grows faster, the voices at the corners of the house rise higher, shriller. You look down at your slippers, poke up the fire, settle a little deeper into the big chair, and beg Eve to go on with the reading.

And she reads on —

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed.

***

Between the andirons’ straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.

But you will be snow-bound in the morning and cannot get to town? Perhaps; but it happened so only twice to me in the long snowy winter of 1904. So twice we read the poem, and twice we lived the poem, and twice? yes, a thousand times, we were glad for a day at home that wasn’t Sunday, for a whole long day to pop corn with the boys.

A farm, of all human habitations, is most of a home, and never so much of a home as in the winter when the stock and the crops are housed, when furrow and boundary fence are covered, when earth and sky conspire to drive a man indoors and to keep him in, – where he needs to stay for a while and be quiet.

No problem of city life is more serious than the problem of making in the city a home. A habitation where you can have no garden, no barn, no attic, no cellar, no chickens, no bees, no boys (we were allowed one boy by the janitor of our city flat), no fields, no sunset skies, no snow-bound days, can hardly be a home. To live in the fifth flat, at No. 6 West Seventh Street, is not to have a home. Pictures on the walls, a fire in the grate, and a prayer in blending zephyrs over the door for God to bless the place can scarcely make of No. 6 more than a sum in arithmetic. There is no home environment about this fifth flat at No. 6, just as there is none about cell No. 6, in the fifth tier of the west corridor of the Tombs.

The idea, the concept, home, is a house set back from the road behind a hedge of trees, a house with a yard, with flowers, chickens, and a garden, – a country home. The songs of home are all of country homes: —

How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood
When fond recollection presents them to view:

***

The gutter, the lamp-post, the curb that ran by it,
And e’en the brass spigot that did for a well. —

Impossible! You cannot sing of No. 6, West Seventh, fifth flight up. And what of a home that cannot be remembered as a song! It is not a home, but only a floor over your head, a floor under your feet, a hole in the wall of the street, a burrow into which you are dumped by a hoisting machine. It is warm inside; Eve is with you, and the baby, and your books. But you do not hear the patter of the rain upon the roof, nor the murmur of the wind in the trees; you do not see the sun go down beyond the wooded hills, nor ever feel the quiet of the stars. You have no largeness round about you; you are the centre of nothing; you have no garden, no harvest, no chores, – no home! There is not room enough about a city flat for a home, nor chores enough in city life for a living.

For a man’s life consisteth not in an abundance of things, but in the particular kind and number of his chores. A chore is a fragment of real life that is lived with the doing. All real living must be lived; it cannot be bought or hired. And herein is another serious problem in city life, – it is the tragedy of city life that it is so nearly all lived for us. We hire Tom, Dick, and Harry to live it; we buy it of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. It is not so here on the farm; for here one has the full round of life’s chores, and here, on a professor’s salary, one may do all the chores himself.

We may hire our praying and our thinking done for us and still live; but not our chores. They are to the life of the spirit what breathing and eating and sleeping are to the life of the body. Not to feed your own horse is to miss the finest joy of having a horse, – the friendship of the noble creature; not to “pick up” the eggs yourself, nor hoe your own garden, nor play with your own boys! Why, what is the use of having boys if you are never going to be “it” again, if you are not to be a boy once more along with them!

There are some things, the making of our clothes, perhaps, that we must hire done for us. But clothes are not primitive and essential; they are accidental, an adjunct, a necessary adjunct, it may be, but belonging to a different category from children, gardens, domestic animals, and a domestic home. And yet, how much less cloth we should need, and what a saving, too, of life’s selvage, could we return to the spinning-wheel and loom as we go back to the farm and the daily chores!

She, harvest done, to char work did aspire,
Meat, drink, and twopence were her daily hire.

And who has not known the same aspiration? has not had a longing for mere chores, and their ample compensation? It is such a reasonable, restful, satisfying aspiration! Harvest done! Done the work and worry of the day! Then the twilight, and the evening chores, and the soft closing of the door! At dawn we shall go forth again until the evening; but with a better spirit for our labor after the fine discipline of the morning chores. The day should start and stop in our own selves; labor should begin and come to an end in the responsibility of the wholesome, homely round of our own chores.