XXVI

FEW MOMENTS of the country year are as lovely as the green quiet of an early summer morning. Rising today soon after sunrise, I found a world as still as if the winds had not yet been created, the whole summer landscape lying immersed in quiet as in a dewy sea. Under the fresh sky and the increasing eastern light, no branch or even leaf stirred on the old apples near the door; not the smallest breath or whiplash of wandering air moved within the grass bent over and sunken down as with a weight of rain; in its hollow the pond was all one calm of peace and early morning blue. Even the young swallows on the wires, sitting as is their wont facing into the sun, kept their places and were still.

As I stood by the farm door looking down the hill slope into this world so silent and at peace, I found myself beginning to wonder about the country sounds which would presently arise to break this blessedness of quiet. Nobody as yet seemed astir; I could see no smoke as yet rising from the chimneys of the road. Suddenly across the light and silence, across space and the immense peace of the morning came a first morning sound, the crow of a rooster from some farm beyond the fields. Clear and challenging, and little muted by distance, it pierced the day—that strange and threefold outcry at once musical and harsh which is to my mind the symbol of the challenge of all things living to life itself and its possible splendors and disasters. Danger, time, the shadow of the hawk, Death itself—in that cry all were greeted and defied. And then next door I saw the smoke of a kitchen fire rising in blue unfoldings to the light.

Soon a cow lowed and another cow, breaking the quiet with that morning sound in which there is both recognition and a call for attention. Farm animals, horses in particular, are often sociable creatures, and make sociable noises and whinnyings which are greetings and little else. Half a mile down the road, my neighbor Irving Oliver’s pair of white horses would now be showing a morning restlessness, and whinnying when they heard the kitchen door open and steps coming to the barn. From across the pond came the barking of a dog, but this sound was silenced almost at once, and the whole countryside returned again into its soundless peace.

*   *   *

The farm world, nevertheless, had begun its tasks. As I busied myself at some small chores of my own, I could see my neighbor Carroll Winchenbaugh coming and going about his barn. All up and down the country road the stoves had been lighted, the cows milked and the milk put away to cool, and breakfast made ready against the cares of the day. The hens, too, had been visited and fed, all in that strange sound of cackling and crooning from the flock, and neighbors would be carrying back the two or three eggs they had happened to see, leaving the real collection till later in the morning. The frisky, crafty-eyed pig had had his “vittles,” and the cats their saucer of milk beside the stove. These obligations seen to, the farm itself would presently be sitting down with a good conscience to its own repast.

The sun was rising into a sky of an even clearer blue; it promised to be a fine day. Soon one would hear the sounds of the manifold and unending work of the farm world, the sound of a farm truck, perhaps, or the noise of someone repairing and carpentering or the fine sound of a whetstone and a scythe. There would be voices in the distance across the fields, and it was almost time for the early morning train. Quiet as it remained, the day itself was coming to a new life. The heavy dew was going off into space, the pond had lost its quiescence of calm though it remained in morning peace, and a first wandering breeze, a mere sigh of the awakening air, presently fluttered the leaves of one branch of the older apple tree. The country day had begun.

FARM DIARY

Above our railroad crossing, on a wooded hillock, a number of larches stand among white pines and red. Surely one of the most beautiful greens in Nature is the green of the new leaves of this tree. / Honey bees visiting the dandelions. I see them all day long crawling over the golden faces, and filling the air with an industrious hum. / Local housewives putting up jars of dandelion greens for winter use. That green bitterness of early summer can be very refreshing when served with the potatoes and winter squash of February. / Corn beginning to show a green trace in the farm gardens, and we espy crows, those enemies who come in the quiet of the dawn. / Elizabeth meditating a day’s shopping trip to Portland. / A week of northerly winds clear the sky, and cool and even cold evenings bring to a close those first early summer days.

*   *   *

With sundown tonight there will begin one of the great festivals of the agricultural and solar year. It is June twenty-third, the night our era calls St. John’s Eve, but which an earlier time dedicated to the triumph of fire and the sun. In the old Europe which inherited from the Bronze Age, this great feast of the Solstice was celebrated with multitudinous small fires lit throughout the countryside. Fire and the great living sun—perhaps it would be well to honor again these two great aspects of the flame. It might help us to remember the meaning of fire before the hands and fire as a symbol. As never before, our world needs warmth in its cold, metallic heart, warmth to go on and face what has been made of human life, warmth to remain humane and kind.