Sunday. Arose at six, twenty-seven hours ahead of the arrival of the Sunday paper, which gets here at nine o’clock Monday morning—a very great advantage, to my way of thinking. Sunday is my busiest day, since I am without help, and I should not be able to get through it at all if there were any newspapers that had to be read.
The wind blew from the SE and brought rain and the dreariest landscape of the fall. For several hours after arising everything went wrong; it was one of those days when inanimate objects deliberately plot to destroy a man, lying in wait for him cleverly ambushed, and when dumb animals form a clique to disturb the existing order. This is the real farm bloc, this occasional conspiracy—a cow with a bruised teat, a weanling lamb lamenting her separation from the flock, a chain-stitch on a grain sack that refuses to start in the darkness, an absentee cook, a child with a fever, a fire that fails to pick up, a separator in need of a new ring, a lantern dry of kerosene, all conniving under gray skies and with the wind and rain drawing in through the windows on the south side, wetting the litter in the hen pens and causing the flame of life to sputter on the wick. I used to find my spirits sagging during intervals of this sort, but now I have learned about them and know them for what they are—a minority report. I’m not fooled any more by an ill wind and a light that fails. My memory is too good.
More and more people and families are leaving here and going up to the cities, to go into factories or into the Services. It is sad to see so many shut houses along the road. One of our former neighbors, now working in a shipyard, turned up after dinner to call for the five bushels of potatoes he had spoken for earlier in the season. He had driven here on his Sunday off to look after his affairs, including the potatoes, and he told me about the pleasures of building destroyers. We went down cellar and I got some bags and a bushel basket and we measured out the spuds while he held forth about his job. Afterward he said he had something to show me, so we went out to where his car stood and he pointed to the four brand-new tires—a man apart, not like ordinary mortals.
Tomorrow the hunting season opens and the men in these parts will put aside whatever they are doing and go into the woods after some wild meat.
Monday. Noticed this morning how gray Fred is becoming, our elderly dachshund. His trunk and legs are still red but his muzzle, after dozens of major operations for the removal of porcupine quills, is now a sort of strawberry roan, with many white hairs, the result of worry. Next to myself he is the greatest worrier and schemer on the premises and always has too many things on his mind. He not only handles all his own matters but he has a follow-up system by which he checks on all of mine to see that everything is taken care of. His interest in every phase of farming remains undiminished, as does mine, but his passion for details is a kind of obsession and seems to me unhealthy. He wants to be present in a managerial capacity at every event, no matter how trifling or routine; it makes no difference whether I am dipping a sheep or simply taking a bath myself. He is a fire buff whose blaze is anything at all. In damp weather his arthritis makes stair-climbing a tortuous and painful accomplishment, yet he groans his way down cellar with me to pack eggs and to investigate for the thousandth time the changeless crypt where the egg crates live. Here he awaits the fall of an egg to the floor and the sensual delight of licking it up—which he does with lips drawn slightly back as though in distaste at the strange consistency of the white. His hopes run always to accidents and misfortunes: the broken egg, the spilt milk, the wounded goose, the fallen lamb, the fallen cake. He also has an insane passion for a kicked football and a Roman candle, either of which can throw him into a running fit from which he emerges exhausted and frothing at the mouth. He can block a kick, or he can drop back and receive one full on the nose and run it back ten or twelve yards. His activities and his character constitute an almost uninterrupted annoyance to me, yet he is such an engaging old fool that I am quite attached to him, in a half-regretful way. Life without him would be heaven, but I am afraid it is not what I want.
This morning early, after I had milked and separated, I managed to lose my grip on the bowl of new cream as I was removing it from under the spout and lost the whole mess on the floor where it spread like lava to the corners of the room. For a moment my grief at this enormous mishap suffused my whole body, but the familiar assistance of Fred, who had supervised the separation and taken charge of the emergency, came to my relief. He cleaned up a pint and a half of cream so that you would not have known anything had happened. As charboy and scavenger he is the best dog I ever was associated with; nothing even faintly edible ever has to be cleaned up from the floor. He handles it. I allow him to eat any substance he chooses, in order to keep him in fighting trim, and I must say he has never failed me. He hasn’t had a sick day either since the afternoon I salvaged him from a show window on Madison Avenue, suffering from intestinal disorders of a spectacular sort. I have since that time put out a lot of money on him, but it has all been for anaesthetics to keep him quiet during the extraction of quills. Not one cent for panaceas.
The production records being made and broken all the time by war industries have set me to work figuring out how things are going in my own plant. Tonight, after a short struggle, I computed that an egg is laid on this place every 4.2 minutes during the day. This is a great gain over three years ago when sometimes a whole hour would go by on this farm without anything of any consequence happening. I am devoting practically half my time now to producing food, food being something I can contribute to the general cause. My production goals for 1942–1943 are 100 pounds of wool, 14 lambs, 4,000 dozen eggs, 10 spring pigs, 150 pounds of broilers and roasters, 9,000 pounds of milk, and all the vegetables, berries, and fruit needed for home consumption and canning. This is not much for a full-scale farmer, but it is about right for a half-time worker when labor is precarious and implements and materials are hard to get.
Tuesday. There are two distinct wars being fought in the world. One is the actual war, bloody and terrible and cruel, a war of ups and downs. The other is the imaginary war that is the personal responsibility of the advertising men of America—the war you see pictures of in the full-page ads in the magazines. This second war is a lovely thing. We are always winning it, and the paint job stays bright on the bombers that gleam in the strong clean light of a copywriter’s superlative adventure. It is a war in which only the brave and true take part, in which the great heart of America beats in clipped sentences. Every morning the ad men strap on their armor and gird for the fray, usually in four colors. We leap rivers with Goodyear and the Engineers, span oceans with Kelvinator and the Air Force, peel off from a fighter formation with the manufacturer of a snap fastener, blow the daylights out of a Jap cruiser with a lens company located in the Squibb Building. The truth is of course that these manufacturers are indeed participating in mighty events because of the conversion in their plants, and every ad writer becomes a combatant by extension. Almost all of them call Hitler by his first name and taunt him openly. They identify themselves with the physical struggle and the heroic life, so that when the bomb bay door opens and the hand presses the lever you are never quite certain what is coming out—a bomb or a bottle of cleaning fluid. This vicarious ecstasy of the ad men always makes me think of the hero of James Thurber’s story called “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
Wednesday. My cow turned out to be a very large one. The first time I led her out I felt the way I did the first time I ever took a girl to the theater—embarrassed but elated. In both instances the female walked with a firmer step than mine, seemed rather in charge of the affair, and excited me with her sweet scent.
We are having a mild fall. Still no furnace fire, except an occasional slabwood blaze in the morning to take the chill off. Broccoli and chard in the garden, and of course kale, which the frost improves. I like kale: it is the nearest I come to eating grass. Even after the snow comes we still eat kale, pawing for it like a deer looking for frozen apples.
Thursday. In time, ownership of property will probably carry with it certain obligations, over and above the obligation to pay the tax and keep the mortgage going. There are signs that this is coming, and I think it should come. Today, if a landowner feels the urge, he can put a back hoe into his hillside pasture and disembowel it. He can set his plow against the contours and let his wealth run down into the brook and into the sea. He can sell his topsoil off by the load and make a gravel pit of a hayfield. For all the interference he will get from the community, he can dig through to China, exploiting as he goes. With an ax in his hand he can annihilate the woods, leaving brush piles and stumps. He can build any sort of building he chooses on his land in the shape of a square or an octagon or a milk bottle. Except in zoned areas he can erect any sort of sign. Nobody can tell him where to head in—it is his land and this is a free country. Yet people are beginning to suspect that the greatest freedom is not achieved by sheer irresponsibility. The earth is common ground and we are all overlords, whether we hold title or not; gradually the idea is taking form that the land must be held in safekeeping, that one generation is to some extent responsible to the next, and that it is contrary to the public good to allow an individual, merely because of his whims or his ambitions, to destroy almost beyond repair any part of the soil or the water or even the view.
After some years in the country, during which time I have experienced the satisfactions of working the land, building the soil, and making brown into green, I am beginning to believe that our new world that will open up after the war should be constructed round a repopulated rural America, so that a reasonably large proportion of the population shall participate in the culture of the earth. The trend is often in the opposite direction, even in peace. As things are now in America, country living is possible only for those who have either the talents and instincts of a true farmer or the means to live wherever they choose. I think there are large numbers of people who have not quite got either but who would like to (and probably should) dwell in the open and participate to some degree in the agricultural life. Good roads and electric power make the farm a likely unit for a better world, and the country should be inhabited very largely and broadly by all the people who feel at home there, because of its gift of light and air and food and security, and because it supplies a man directly, instead of indirectly. The trend toward the ownership of land by fewer and fewer individuals is, it seems to me, a disastrous thing. For when too large a proportion of the populace is supporting itself by the indirections of trade and business and commerce and art and the million schemes of men in cities, then the complexity of society is likely to become so great as to destroy its equilibrium, and it will always be out of balance in some way. But if a considerable portion of the people are occupied wholly or partially in labors that directly supply them with many things that they want, or think they want, whether it be a sweet pea or a sour pickle, then the public poise will be a good deal harder to upset.
Friday. Four hours at the spotting post today in company with my wife, who hears four-motored bombers in running brooks; but the weather was bad and we saw no planes, friendly or hostile. The post has been moved from behind the postmistress’s barn to the abandoned schoolhouse across the road—not such a good view as the old post but a fine place to get work done between watches, excellent desk facilities (a choice of thirteen little desks), also a Seth Thomas clock, a good stove, an American flag, a picture of Lincoln, a backhouse, and an ancient love message carved in the entry, celebrating MYRTLE.
Saturday. Sent my trousers off for their quarterly pressing yesterday. They travel forty-nine miles to the ironing board, a round trip for them of ninety-eight miles. My pants are without question the best traveled part of me nowadays, and I sometimes envy them their excursions to town. Quite a lark, these days, to go all that distance on rubber. I noticed that the truck that called for them was driven by a girl, taking the place of the young fellow who has gone off to war. She told us that she loved the work—made her feel that she was having her part in the war effort; which surprised me, that anybody should derive that feeling from carting my pants around the country. But I feel exactly the same way about the eggs I produce, even though I know well enough that most of them are being gobbled by voracious people in the environs of Boston.
Found my wife and son and dachshund, all three, sitting under a lap robe on the back porch in the beautiful sunlight this afternoon listening to the Cornell-Yale game on a portable radio, this being the first time in two weeks my boy had been out of bed and the first time the dog had attended a Cornell game. (He was shaking like a leaf with pent-up emotion, and Cornell was behind.) But the three of them looked very wonderful and comical sitting there in their private bowl, and I laughed out loud. My wife, who is just getting through reading the autumn crop of children’s books, informed me that we have a new ritual to look forward to on Christmas eve. (This was from a book called Happy Times in Norway.) We are to go to the barn and give an extra feeding to the animals, saying: “Eat and drink, my good cow, our Lord is born tonight.” I intend to do it, and luckily I have the hay to spare this year. To make it a truly American ritual, however, I suspect we should have to wear smocks and dirndls and perhaps invite a photographer or two from Vogue.