XXXI

IT IS summer, the season of leaves and grass and the ever-changing fancies of the flowing winds, and all day long there seem a thousand things to do. Weeds and pests are now to be fought, and the hay mows filled against the winter: the bright sunshine and the warmth must be made every use of while they last. The scissor-clatter sound of mowing machines begins the working day; and the afternoon sun beats down on bare backs, the steely gleam of hay fork tines, and the lifted bundles of hay falling into the old hayracks swaying and rolling over these hillside fields. Thirsty afternoons, and worthy of the pause by the deep well or the battered enamel cup standing by the spring.

Not owning a mowing machine, I do what so many do here and make a “dicker” with a neighbor to come and cut the hay. The neighbor who comes and helps us is Randall Simmons, and when he arrives in the morning after the sun has dried the fields, he brings his whole family with him for the haying. An old truck drives in and while two small shirtless boys are clambering out from somewhere, Randall and his wife Frances and a pair of tiny little girls are scrambling out from the driver’s seat. As I walk towards the family, I see Randall stop a moment and look with a studying eye at the uncut grass and the silvery morning clouds beginning to drift along the edges of the sky.

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Randall is about thirty. He is shirtless, too, lean in body but rugged and muscular, and outdoor work and sun have tanned him to an Indian brown. Frances is slim and blonde and tall, and often wears old shorts for her work in the field. The costume sounds sophisticated, but so thoroughly is Frances a young farm wife that she might be a girl from some Scythian or Spartan farm.

The children are all of them as flaxen-haired as children in an old-fashioned German Christmas card. The boys are Ordway and Ernest, the girls Rowena and Cherry, and Ordway, who is the oldest, is between nine and ten.

I find it touching to watch the family work together. While Ordway and his father are busy together in one region of the fields, Frances and Ernest will be somewhere else running an improvised tractor and the wheeled rake. Ernest is but a little boy—I doubt if he is yet seven—yet the rake is his chore and task, and on its seat he rides obeying a sign from his mother to lift the curved iron teeth when she has built a windrow into proper line. The two little girls have their chance when the hay is being lifted to the truck. Like tiny maenads in rumpled dresses, they dance up and down on the load, treading down the grass while the late afternoon sun turns their tangled flaxen locks into silken aureoles.

It is done, the truck has a first load, and away they go, the two boys riding the load, the girls on the seat with their mother. I look across my shorn fields and am glad to see the clean stubble stretching from the farm lawn to the stone wall and the darkness of the pines. Randall has left his new and bright red mowing machine under the shelter of a paternal oak; the rake stands deserted in the open field. The farm still lives and carries on its pattern of being. Shadows are lengthening, and the sun silvering, and in a little while I shall hear from the pines that music like a melody of tiny bells which is the song of the hermit thrush.

FARM DIARY

Bolt of lightning strikes a friend’s house; does no particular damage to the dwelling, but kills every minnow in a pail of bait left in the cool of the cellar. / More auctions enliven the neighborhood, and at one such gathering Elizabeth bids in a Turkey-red kitchen tablecloth in excellent condition. Very cheerful for winter use. / The small dog, happy in the summer weather, has taken to snoozing in the full sunlight of the south doorway. / Every saltwater creek and inlet now seems to have its great blue heron, and every pond shore its solitary sandpiper. / Strawberry season over; no more shortcakes at supper. Now come blueberry muffins. / Irving Oliver reports the huge muddy hoof prints of a moose in the woods beyond the clearing made by a portable saw mill. / The spring having been so cold and late, all of us are hoping for a mild and lingering fall. My tomatoes continue to thrive. / Under a half moon in the summer twilight, village boys fishing a backwater of the pond for the huge horn pout or “bullheads” of those waters. These fish make an excellent chowder and are good fried.

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One of the complications of the problem of the machine is the fact that just as certain people are born hunters and farmers, others are born machinists. The mechanical strain is in humanity, and if it has given us a machine civilization increasingly difficult to manage, it has also given us the wheel and the knife. I do not forget that memorable saying of my old friend Edward Gilchrist that “the secret of the artificer is the secret of civilization.” Yet what we must ask today is whether or not the mechanist strain has increased out of all bounds, and taken over an undue proportion of the way of life. It is well to use the wheel but it is fatal to be bound to it.