XX

WITH the arrival of warmth and the wayward genialities of our northern spring, something returns to the farm which is rather a rarity here in the really cold winter—the presence and mystery of rain. Again and again, when weather reports indicate rain scarce a hundred miles away to the south and west, what we get is the same storm as driving snow.

An old friend in the village, a careful observer, tells me that the snow often begins to fall just as the tide reaches the flood. In comes the cold northern sea under the threatening day, filling the estuaries and over-running the tidal flats with its deep and powerful streams, and then—out of the greyness comes the snow. Sometimes the flood, the snow, and the night arrive together, and we bring in more wood, and look to a white world in the morning.

Now, however, the earth leans towards the sun, and what we get is rain. It is spring rain, and so far we have had no drenching, day-long downpours of it, but only scattered showers from a sky whose monotony of rain and grey has been wan with light.

It is such a drizzle as I write, and I can hear the familiar sound of which I have already spoken, the murmur and tinkle of the rainwater falling into the cistern below the kitchen floor. Spatters of rain stand on the western windows, and outside goes on the long, steady, life-giving drenching of the earth. On the pasture rocks, it will be falling through the pines at the circumference, and soaking everywhere into the brown, needle-covered ground; in the hemlocks, it will be dripping from the greenery above down upon delicate twigs which will nod an instant like things poised on a delicate wire; here and there, all through the wood, the little rain brooks will be foamily chattering as they run through their familiar channels in and out of the mossy and tumbled stones. The strange sigh, the grave and hissing whisper of an evergreen forest in the rain will be everywhere in the air for the listening ear.

For me, it means rubber boots, an old rubber coat with a bad tear in it, and a fisherman’s “souwester” I bought long ago on Matinicus Island. I have just been out to get a pail of spring water, and have splashed a little on the kitchen floor.

The outer world was full of rain and nothing else. I couldn’t see a soul anywhere. No one about, no one rubber-booting it across a field, no one in sight in any farm yard, and the empty pond just a vast puddle of greyness and rain. At the end of the shed, a waterspout gurgled foolishly, whilst the leaning water in my rain barrel overflowed silently to one side. From the grass at my feet, from the fields, from the hollow of space itself, I could hear the myriad sound of the light rain and the passive and awakening land.

I have a notion that when this stops, we are going to have a week of warm winds and the good, warm, blessed sun.

FARM DIARY

Some years ago at a neighborhood auction I bought an old copy in colors of Landseer’s “The Rescue,” an academy picture of the 1870’s. It is a “story picture” showing a defile of the Great St. Bernard pass and a young traveler lying there half-buried and unconscious in the snow. Two St. Bernard dogs have just discovered him. One, whom we call “the nurse,” is attempting to rouse the youth whilst the other, whom we call “the doctor,” is giving tongue in a noble pose, and pawing away the drifts. The “doctor” has a blanket wound about his middle and the famous keg of brandy suspended from his collar. In the wild, Alpine background some monks of St. Bernard are hastening to the scene. This picture marks winter for us at the farm. It goes up on the kitchen wall the day the first snow falls, and I take it down the day the ice goes out of the pond. Every farm and every family ought to have a few ritual jokes that are all their own./ The first fruits of the northern year, rhubarb stalks, are coming along. The farm will have to manage a small rhubarb pie somehow or other, or the season won’t begin in proper style.

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It often strikes me that in our modern Babylons you never see anything begin. Everything comes to you, even thought, at a certain stage of its development, like an iceberg lettuce. Now life is more a matter of beginnings than of endings, and without some sense of the beginning of things, there is no proper perspective on the whole mystery of living. This is only one detail, but it will serve as one of the marks of the whole incomplete urban perspective in which we live. For the city governs us now as never before; it tells us what to love and what to hate, what to believe and what not to believe, and even what to make of human nature.

I begin to suspect that we should be more on our guard against Babylon when its urbanism has gone bloodless and sterile, and it insists on our taking its false maps of the human adventure. We must regain the truer and fuller perspective, one leading back to origins and to beginnings human, earthy, concealed, and slow. No map is worthy a penny which does not include both the city and the fields.