XLIII

THERE is a time in the later autumn when a vast cloud of fog forms almost every night above the pond, and, rising to fill the vale of the enclosing shores, spills over and out upon higher land as from a bowl filled and overflowing. No longer a vaporous mist but a mass thickened and opaque, it lies so dense at sunrise that sometimes I can scarce see from the farm to the farm gate, and I walk to whatever chores await me through a world without known bounds and suspended at once in morning silence and humid nothingness. Farmers, however, are early risers, and fog is a good carrier of sound, and presently I am sure to hear far noises across the texture of mist and perhaps the distant challenge of some farmyard chanticleer.

Thick as the fog lies floating on the earth, there is usually a blue sky standing open overhead. By ten o’clock, on any sunshiny morning, we commonly have our world again. The mist dissolves rather than lifts, and as it thins, the pasture fence and the golden trees appear, and the slow transformation scene ends with a view of the other side of the pond and its shore of pines scattered through with hardwoods in all their blazing color. Sometimes scarves and last wreaths of mist linger in the coldness of the shadowed woods, but the sun will have none of this, and presently these, too, melt and are gone, and the world belongs again to autumn and the blue and spacious day.

So peaceful it was this morning and so lovely, that I hurried through what indoor work lay ahead of me and turned again to out of doors. A delicate and scarcely perceptible haze of moisture remained in the air after the clearing, and it seemed to me that this residual transparency of mist gave an added glow to all the nearer scene. The maples, I noticed, were fast losing their foliage, and leaving the world to the leather-reds and russets of the oaks.

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Halfway down the east slope, I could see my neighbors, the Olivers, gathering in their beans. The white horse Prince and the blue hayrack stood in the heart of the great field, and beyond the rack moved the figures of Father Oliver, his son Irving and four-year-old grandson John in a red sweater, bright as any autumnal leaf. The beans had been stacked on stout poles, as is our local custom, and from the house I could see Irving taking up, one after another, these brown and withered towers, first swaying the poles about and working them loose in the earth. Both Elwell and Irving then laid their huge burdens in the rack with the poles slanting forward, and each pole, I thought, seemed taller than a man.

No more would I look down and see these rustic pillars scattered over the field in the cold autumnal moonlight; no more would I see the small migrants flying to and fro between the pole tops and the ground. The load assembled, Irving climbed into the rack and took up the reins. Father Oliver then handed in the little boy and climbed in himself. The white horse started, stopped, and started again, and the load of harvest life came slowly up the hill.

The old-fashioned “baked bean” is an important part of our farm economy in this higher north. With plenty of “baking beans” in storage, a piece of salt pork, and a jug of molasses in the “buttery,” a wood range that knows its business in the kitchen, and a family bean pot in the oven, we feel ready here for anything that may arrive when the north and east darken beyond the hills and a three day storm begins to howl.

FARM DIARY

Buy for ten cents at the rummage table of a Grange Fair a huge, old-fashioned, blue and white bandanna handkerchief of that older cotton which is softer and more pleasant to handle than modern cloth. Elizabeth thinks it has never seen use, and is a relic of the 70’s or 8o’s from some chest in a local attic. / Sundown, and a country road through the woods coming to an end with a somber arch of pines, and in the arch the bright sickle of the new moon unclouded and serene. / Shaken from the dooryard trees by a light, almost imperceptible wind, leaves drift down past the kitchen windows in the rhythm of the great flakes which so often announce the beginning of a night of snow. / Our friend Tom Sherman, standing firm-footed on the ridge pole of our barn, restores to its place and mounted on a new staff our “Johnny Ride the Sky,” the horse-and-jockey weather vane which has come down to us from the farm’s horse and buggy years.

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How pleasant to spend some time with a singing family! During my own lifetime, one of the most dismal social changes of our world has been the disappearance of singing as part of human life and the work that has to be done. People used to sing, now you scarcely hear anyone even whistle. The world is poorer for the loss. There is nothing like music for giving one a sense of solidarity, and it lightens both labor and the heart.