XLII

AS I FELL asleep, I could hear the rain lashing at the windows, and all the outer dark of the night beyond the lamplight and the walls was full of the noises of the storm. When I woke, a little before sunrise, I saw that it had cleared in the depth of the night, and that the gale from the North Atlantic had blown itself to rags like an old sail, leaving us a drenched earth and a tranquil and shining world. Looking toward the pond from the kitchen windows to the east, I could see the sun about to rise from behind a mere scarf of cloud which floated in bright air close above the ridge, and presently saw the cloud-edge gild itself with light, and the rim of the sun leap forth into the blue.

A new world came into being with the sudden gilding of that arc and sector of sunlight above the frail barrier of that last outpost of cloud. The hayfield slopes leaped into a new existence with the vast and sudden instancy of light, tree shadows sprang into being, and on the peaceful water of the pond, and to the south of the little island with its pines, there appeared a vast brilliance of mirrored and coldly-metallic light. Not only had the rain quieted the earth, giving it a moment of fixity and repose, but it had everywhere deepened the colors of the landscape, darkening the columns of the trees, and laying a hand of brightness on the fields.

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The great water tank being at low ebb, I went down the eastern slope to the pump-house soon after I had built my morning fires. Halfway down to the pond is a cabbage patch belonging to my friend and neighbor Elwell Oliver, and the rain-washed plants glowed in the rain-washed air and against the autumn landscape like huge, rustic shapes of Chinese green-jade. I imagine the color was heightened, as well, by the bright darkness of a young and solitary pine I have allowed to grow up by a rock pile to one corner of the patch, for there it stood beyond the cabbage rows, the branches to the south thrust forth motionless into the increasing light of the morning sun.

The patch was alive with a migration of autumnal sparrows. It was a confusion of flying to and fro, of small, brownish birds, busy, restless, and searching for food, all in a restless sound of the small brushing by of feathers and the flutter of wings. There were a number of species, among them tree sparrows and fox sparrows, the latter predominating, both of these species being summer birds of the even higher north. I was particularly glad to see a single white-crowned sparrow foraging on his own. The birds perched upon the edges of the great cabbage leaves, which surprisingly did not bend with them; they inquired and searched about in a circle below the leaves; they flew to and fro between the patch and the small pine.

The coming of these northern sparrows down from Quebec and the frontiers of Ungava is a sign of winter. One of these cold nights we shall have snow.

FARM DIARY

The other night, just as I was putting the house to bed, I happened to remember that I had left a loaf of bread in the car, and stepped out into the pitch darkness to “fetch it in.” Just as I reached the car and was feeling about in the darkness for the handle of the rear door, I heard some sizable animal stirring about quite near me, and a few seconds later the sound of the thing going toward the woods. By the time I had opened the car door and switched on the headlights, there was nothing whatever to be seen. A deer, perhaps, though deer are not much given to wandering about in pitch darkness. The car was standing on the farm lawn about fifty feet from the house. / Far down a hillslope and in all the golden quiet of the autumnal afternoon, I see a neighbor cleaning up his garden, and a pillar of bright flame burning in the center of the field. / The farm produce stands along Route 1 now come into their autumn glory of apples, squashes, and giant pumpkins backed by a shelf of cider jugs and jars of homemade “chili sauce.” We stop at such a stand under a great, golden maple and Elizabeth buys some “cherry tomatoes” which turn out to be quite good.

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Looking out over my fields, I think to myself that they not only have their own fierce American sun, but their own separate and American rhythm of time. I have long been convinced that one of the causes of dissension between Europe and America is a differing sense of time, the Europeans living by one sense of time, we by another. They live by the present and the past, we by the present and the future, and they live by a beat less mechanical than ours.