XXXIX

FOUR DAYS of an almost southern warmth follow the first frost, and August returning to September’s landscape, visits the far horizons with a peaceful haze of smoky blue. By day thin clouds lie as seeming still as if they had been painted on the sky, and by night, and rather strangely, the northern lights tower above the warm earth and the placid air, the mysterious glowing centering on the zenith rather than about the pole. Some of us like the change and welcome the higher temperature recorded near the kitchen door, others of us—and I fear I am one of them—are made ungratefully uncomfortable, and working about, glance at the barn weathervane and hope it will presently swing into the north.

Grateful or ungrateful as we may be, the days are too fine to spend five minutes indoors, and I have used them working mornings in the kitchen garden and splitting wood in the afternoons. Some of the birch Lawrence brought me is in rather heavy “junks,” and needs another session with chopping block and axe.

It has been a curiously windless summer, and these days, too, are very still. As I worked with the strawberries this morning in the growing silence and the mellow autumn light, now kneeling by the plants, now standing up and working with a light hoe, a thought came into my head of how good country smells can be and of how varied they are throughout the year. As I grubbed about close to the plants, hunting and pulling out any small, intrusive weeds, gone from the earth was the August smell of summer and dust and watered soil and watered leaves, gone the smell of earth which had a teeming earth life of its own. This September earth had lost warmth; it no longer dried out; in a few weeks it would be a cold and wintry mire with the cold smell of mire.

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The seasons have their fragrance. In summer there is a smell of greenness, of heat, and grass and surface dust; in autumn the fragrance is one of cold dews and ripeness, of fallen leaves and the tang and ferment of leaves, of a world smouldering and withering away in the year’s invisible fires. Sometimes the good hearty reek of some field crops is carried to the nose, and when an evening wind humid with a threat of rain blows through our kitchen windows a good, honest, country smell of cabbages. With winter will come a new earth and seasonal smell, fierce and keen and very real—the smell of snow.

What a world of the nose the country can be from the cidery smell of apples rotting in the brown, frosty grass under a wild apple tree to the honorable aroma of freshly dug onions spread on sacking in the autumn sun. There are plenty of others, hearty enough, some of them, but all, somehow or other, fit into a country world.

I meant to stay out of doors in the writing of these notes, but I find now that I must step inside if I am not to forget one of the most characteristic of good autumnal smells. Going to see friends yesterday on a small matter of farm business, I stepped into a kitchen which was all order and sunlight and the smell of cooking “piccalilli.”

It was enough to make one lyrical, so completely blessed, so wholeheartedly good was that fragrance of spices and “garden sass” up-breathing from an enamel cauldron on the stove! The sunilght slanted on the linoleum floor, the family cat rubbed against my leg, and I stood there a moment lost—lost in a dream of boyhood and other kitchens, of another sunlight and unforgotten presences, and all the long and varied years.

FARM DIARY

Neighbors’ Night at the Grange and three of our prettiest girls, dressed in costumes of the 8o’s from the family attics, sing an amusing, topical song. I can see that all three young ladies are taller than the original wearers of the rich, old-fashioned silks. / The telephone rings and our kind friend and next-door neighbor Louise Winchenbaugh calls up to tell me that she is churning today, and would I like a pound of the fresh, unsalted butter? Indeed we would, and I shall stroll down for it early this afternoon. / Hardy crysanthemums now coming into bloom. / Elizabeth absent for the evening, having gone to Damariscotta to a ladies’ party.

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When I am here by myself, and the small dog and I share together the too-quiet evening and the open fire, I read the agricultural papers and journals which have been put aside in the kitchen cupboard for just such a solitary night. I never read through such a basketful without being struck by the good, sound, honest English of the writing, by the directness and simplicity of the narratives, and by the skill and forthright vigor of the arguments. Whether the topic be tomatoes or ten-penny nails, their writers know how to say things and say them well.

I am glad that the country world thus retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.