XXXVII

THE other day, while visiting with friends, I chanced to follow a path which led to a river across a kind of blueberry pasture heavily overgrown with goldenrod. The hour was close to noon, the day sunny and very still, and from all about me and the earth world at my feet I could hear the myriad and continuous hum of insects working in the bright expanse of yellow flowers. Finding the place and the sound of interest, I stood for a little time at a turn of the path, inclosed, as it were, in some great hollow shell filled with the insect music of the earth. I took it as a kind of farewell of that strange and alien world of insect life which lives beside our own and disputes our human overlordship. These cold nights of early September are the twilight of the insect mystery; in a little while our rivals will be gone, and the north again belong to us and the snow.

Every year at the farm I watch the insect kingdom come into its northern being, flourish in what we have of heat and sun, live out its myriad life, and disappear almost as if it had never been. Though on warm days in mid-winter one may sometimes see in the woods some solitary and out-of-season “fly” only an entomologist could name, our insect world is essentially a presence and a manifestation of heat and light which rises to its very ecstasy of insect being on days when the sun glares unbearably, the earth cakes, and the garden flowers droop their wilted leaves.

Heat it is which rules and maddens that curious world. It is when the sun burns above that the deer-fly plagues us in the fields, circling furiously about our heads and striking at us with its darting, poisonous bite, it is then that the great dragonflies hunt the borders and the waters of the pond, then that the moths come of nights to knock clumsily against the screens of lighted rooms, and flutter aimlessly and foolishly over the incomprehensible mesh of wire. We are aware of the world most responsively, perhaps, when it annoys us and we have to wage battle with its swarming appetites, yet harmless butterflies can please us like children with their frivolity and beauty, and we can stare at some small crawling monster and begin thinking of Nature’s unappreciated and too-little considered adventures in the world of the grotesque.

An alien, an ever alien world, and to be honest, one that sometimes chills the blood as do those magnified photographs which show the insect mask—for they are a faceless tribe—the insect mask with its dragon jaws and stony, expressionless, ten thousand similar eyes. Moralists tell us to go to the ant and be wise, but the ant has always seemed to me a dull creature without joy and a tremendous nuisance in the pantry. Of all the kingdom man has been able to place but one creature under the shadow of his hand—the honey bee—that fierce, small thing from which he has nothing he does not obtain by guile.

Where should we be, we shall have to ask, without the aid of this kingdom in pollination? We should be in a sorry case indeed, our orchards and gardens reduced to skeletons and ghosts of what they should be in quality, yield, and vitality of seed. Nature has many a trick with pollens, calling to the aid of her passion for life all kinds of curious floral mechanisms for self-pollination and the powers of the wind. Self-pollination, however, has two sides, now being a casual business, now a final and desperate trick when all else has failed. When our orchards bear, let us be grateful to the bees, and remember that man has a number of food plants which some special insect alone can pollinate.

I write these lines late at night in the big kitchen, alone at the table by “the dead and drowsy fire.” But a moment ago, I saw a small darkish something move upon the linoleum square which fills the center of the floor: it was a field cricket, the first invader of the year. We shall have many such refugees when the nights grow even more cold, and an autumnal moon rides high above the leafless trees and grass that will be frosty in the morning. I had forgotten that the cricket, too, was a part of our human life and its tradition. He shall hide tonight where he will.

FARM DIARY

West and south along Route 1, the visiting cars whiz by us with their out-of-state number plates, homeward bound through the bright September days. / School begins, and on a country road near an old, one-room schoolhouse of mellowed brick, a boy of nine or ten is carrying a fresh pail of drinking water back for the “scholars.” We use the old word here. / Myrtle warblers moving south and taking their time about it pause at the farm, and sample the red berries of the Tartarian honeysuckle. / In the pleasant bouquets which Elizabeth puts in the parlor I notice for the first time a tiny branch of autumn leaves included with the yellow autumn flowers.

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I understand from various friends that there is a campaign going on in rural areas to re-open our old-fashioned, one-room country schools. Well … one might go farther and fare worse. What such schools used to be able to give us is something we very badly need, and that is a real first sense of being a member of a definite community. Without more of that sense than we now have, there is not much sensible hope of the better nation out of which must come the better world. The big, over-crowded modern schools with their parades and drum-majorettes and courses in “citizenship” just do not give this vital sense of human association. I shall watch any such small school experiment with interest, and so here’s a Porter apple for dear teacher, and may the children be sent home early when the afternoon darkens and the stove glows red, and the snow begins to fall.