XXI

ALL MORNING long the farm has been in a fine, cheerful, and uproarious confusion. Our friend Louis French the plumber having come to help us, we have been changing over the kitchens, connecting our water system, tuning-up gas engines, and redistributing the furniture. Out went the winter stove and off came the storm shutters, and while we men folk were going upstairs and downstairs checking for leaks and turning on sputtering faucets, Elizabeth and our kind neighbor Barbara Oliver were hunting the winter out of his last hiding places in the closed bedrooms, and putting him to flight through the great front door. It was hard physical work for all of us, but now that the place is in order again, the house positively glows with a vernal and country satisfaction.

To explain the turmoil, I had best make clear the summer and winter ritual of the house. Like many of these older farms, we have two kitchens in the ell, a summer one and a winter one, each with its own sink, its chimney, and its running water. Of the two, the “summer kitchen” is the cooler and more airy, and in some ways the easier to use. It is a pleasant room with painted white walls, pearl-grey woodwork, old beams left “natural” and a brown linoleum floor. We sometimes call it the “St. Lawrence kitchen” because some of the old-fashioned jars and containers were picked up by Elizabeth in the river villages.

The “winter kitchen” is the room we turn to when the late autumnal cold begins to close in upon the house. This is the room which is our final stronghold against the snow. It is warmer than its summer counterpart and nearer the main house, and there is a sort of primitive cellar lurking beneath the floor. A huge red brick chimney fireplace built out into the room is here the center of life, cheerful all autumn long with hardwood fires. Unwilling as we are to close it off, there is always some November day when we seal the fireplace cave with a “fire-front,” and set up an old winter stove we store in a corner of the shed. The summer kitchen is then drained, the last fire suffered to go out, the pots and pans transferred, and the room abandoned to the cold. Beyond the partition, the pail from the spring becomes our drinking water, the cistern supply our washing water, and the winter range our household deity.

It was on this winter economy we descended this morning like a vernal wolf on the fold. Lawrence and I worked at the house, the plumber and his helper at the lake, and in an hour or two we had the lake water up the hill and humming in the pipes, and the engine going and the great cypress tank overflowing like water over a dam. The familiar clank of the cistern pump would be heard no more awhile. The next thing on the program was the summer kitchen, and here the ladies came to our aid, abandoning whatever they were up to in the front of the house. In three shakes of a lamb’s tail, or so it seemed, they had it in proper order, its pots and pans hung on the wall, a fire burning in the range, and a kettle steaming.

Only one last thing remained to be done, the moving out of the winter stove. We had built but a small fire in it that morning, and this was now only a bed of ash. Elizabeth says that we all went for it in a kind of “solemn rush.” It is not a heavy stove, and surrounded by plumbers and by Lawrence and myself, it went very peaceably into the shed. An easy tug at the fire-front, and there stood the fireplace yawning black, and looking rather sooty and in need of sweeping. I made this my job and, when I had finished, Lawrence drove us all forth and took a pail and mop and did the floor. Tonight, if it is cool, Elizabeth will light the first fire for it is one of my pet superstitions, inherited from a wise and ever-honored grandmother, that the first hearthfire of the year must be lit by the woman of the house.

The winter kitchen now looked very large. Its windows were open, and all the pleasant world outside seemed full of the singing of birds. Summer was at hand, the trees were in young leaf, the fields were really green, and the skies were mild and blue. In the house, too, it was summer again. Musing a moment on the change, there came to me out of the long past a pretty song taught me in childhood from a songbook of all nations, “Winter farewell, winter farewell, and away you go and trouble us no more.”

FARM DIARY

Friends tell me that flocks of Canada geese are still in the rivers and saltwater estuaries, not having yet left us for the higher north. / And the chipping sparrows are back, familiars of the farmhouse and the lawn, great hunters of crumbs and the small ants who go to and fro on the piazza. / People who are connected with the “tourist trade” are now busy everywhere, giving final touches to their cabins and rooms, and putting up road signs brightened with fresh paint. / Our winter woolens now vanish into attic bureaus and cedar chests, and out come the blue denims and the mended cotton shirts and the battered straw hats. / Great plans and confabs in the fireplace kitchen concerned with another vast planting of potatoes. / When the season opens on June first, I guess I’ll try and see if I can’t get us a nice bass for a farm breakfast.

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Our neighbors, the Olivers, have given Elizabeth a birthday present of a handloomed towel made at their farm some seventy years ago. Elwell Oliver tells me that it was woven by his mother, who was famous for her fine weaving, and that the flax of which it is made was both grown and spun here by the shores of the pond. What has this memorial of the handicrafts which something made by the machine does not possess? The answer can be given in a phrase; it has life. The machine-made thing has the mark of the un-living device. The thing made by hand has the signature of the living spirit.