XXII

THIS morning Irving Oliver came over to plough the kitchen garden by the barn. He brought with him the rig he uses, a sulky-plough pulled by his cherished team of huge white horses, the inseparable, good-tempered, and willing Major and Prince. Irving believes, and he is entirely right, that it is a waste of time and money to fool with expensive machinery for our kind of farming. When he came driving towards us, coming over the fields from another neighbor’s, it was certainly a sight to cheer the country heart! The sulky-plough looked like a Roman chariot, no less, with its fine matched pair pulling confidently forward, their great equine heads held boldly up, and their manes stirring with the motion forward and a touch of the southwest wind.

When one’s country lies under the snow for months of the year, and the spring which isn’t quite a spring comes but a step or two ahead of summer, the first ploughing of one’s land can be something to stir the heart. On came Irving in his chariot, the iron wheels rolling out their iron sound as they reached the harder ground leading to the barn, and presently Major and Prince were there beside us, and Irving holding the reins in his hand, and asking me just what I wanted done.

Irving is an old friend and neighbor, and one of the best. He is still in his thirties, a young family man, lean, strong, and grey-eyed. We passed the time of day, neighbor fashion, and then got down to business.

“You want this piece ploughed the same size as last year?” “Bout the same, but give me five more furrows towards the pond.”

The horses stirred, lifting their huge deliberate feet and shifting their vast selves over; down went a blade, took hold, and the first wave of earth began to roll over and glisten in the light. Our soil is heavy, and the clays and pale, northern gravels of the glaciers are consolidated in it with what there is of top soil, humus and the fertility of a hundred and fifty successive years of barn manure. A few black flies, occasional nuisances of warm days in mid-May, once in a while demanded a brush of the hands but no one paid any real attention to them, and Major and Prince seemed entirely undisturbed. Perhaps the tree swallows were giving us help, for their shadows passed and repassed over the furrows in the warm and pleasant sun.

A sulky-plough is a particularly good rig for our kind of soil and these old-fashioned fields, and Irving handles it and his fine team with sureness and skill. The great creatures ploughed with an animal goodwill, with a kind of honest and confident assurance that all was well in their equine world; one could see that they were as much at ease with Irving as Irving was with them. He has always taken pride in their handsome appearance, and in their powers.

Over and over rolled the waves of soil, stray tufts of grass and precocious weeds tumbling under the long volutes of the furrows, whilst the glisten of earth curled over above, revealing the deeper clays, the small embedded stones, and the pink of earthworms disturbed in their fertile tunnels underground. Beyond the ploughing and down the slopes, the pond lay blue and still, whilst overhead the sun in the south drew near the heights of noon.

The living year had begun.

FARM DIARY

Sign of the times … an out-of-state car driven by a decent stranger in his early forties drives in, and I am asked if I know where one can buy a farm? I give him an agent’s address, and away he goes. / The animal life of the hayfields is again coming into being. Going down to the pump at the pond, small leopard-frogs now scramble out from before my feet here and there along the path. / Our first show of wild flowers has begun, and the familiar carpets of bluets or “Quaker Ladies” are in bloom on damp hillsides and in old, wet grassland still open in the woods. / Have been putting in some strawberry plants of a trick variety which does not develop runners. Our cold springs here are not friendly to strawberries, and I am always trying experiments. These plants came from Iowa, and arrived in excellent condition. / Elizabeth has returned from a visit, bringing the house a present of a handwoven tablecloth from some old Mennonite farm in Pennsylvania. Looks to me like work of the 1870’s. The design is a simple blue and white check. A beautiful, human, and honest thing, and peace be with the hands that made it.

*   *   *

I have been sitting in a farm kitchen, holding down a rocking chair in an impromptu gathering of friends and neighbors, and what I now remember is how uproariously we all laughed together over any number of things.

I have only a hazy notion as to what so amused me, for on such an evening the whole remembered humor of the countryside blows through the room and the mind, keeping the sense of place vigorously alive and helping us laugh at ourselves and with ourselves. One hears of the picturesque characters, the absurd adventures, the comic predicaments, the drolleries of animals—everything which has been cherished by a people with a very lively and kindly sense of fun.

Are we farm people the only ones left who still laugh with gusto in the old, almost roll-on-the-floor way? I sometimes rather fear so. On the farms we laugh, I think, from the body and the human spirit whilst the age, if it laughs at all, screams from a tension of the nerves. Heaven knows that the times have little to laugh at, though would they had, for laughter is a notable part of our humanity, a thing seemingly given to man alone.

When it thins down into the trickle of the wisecrack and the sneer, the sense of proportion is gone. I am glad we laughed as we did. The devilry of this world is the work of the too serious. I walked home still merry, down the dark road alongside a great planet rising in the east.