COUNTRY CHRONICLE
Beston, Henry
Country Chronicle Return of the Miracle By HENRY BESTON Nobleboro, Maine SO OVERCLOUDED, rainy, cold, and cheerless was the Spring that one felt that another wet and dismal day would see the...
...Lawrence" for the Rivers of America Series...
...Not that we shouldn't have as real a sense of the future as a squirrel gathering nuts in the Fall...
...Is it because, as HENRY BESTON, noted naturalist and author, has contributed much to The Progressive ini recent years, especially his "Country Chronicle" columns subsequently published in book form...
...In our times the centering of emphasis on the future (and all our social scheming involves the perspective) has resulted in a present lived tentatively, precariously, and incompletely...
...I thought of how there had been a school of pastoral poetry in every civilized language, and of how the fairy-tale shepherd and shepherdess with their pretty Eighteenth Century clothes and be-ribboned crooks had been an inheritance of the civilized spirit in the West...
...I once wrote, the industrial age has no true historical past...
...everywhere the sodden forest murmured with the sound of water...
...Looking at the woolly lambs and seeing how pretty, foolish, and innocent they were with their gay leaps and friskings, my mind wandered a moment from farming to literature...
...Looking out to the country world through the spattered panes, I knew well enough that the great seasonal revival of life was progressing in spite of the rain and the grey cold...
...But the true revelation of the change in the year did not come till the second sunny day...
...Something with a mild and ' pleasant smell of onions was cooking on the range, and in the "buttery" was a fresh baking of bread giving off the most delicious of aromas which can rise to the nose of a man...
...It was almost early Summer...
...It was more than Spring...
...Beginning pleasantly enough in the very early morning, with blue skies and dewy fields, they invariably, and rather mysteriously, darkened over as one sat at breakfast, and presently spattered their first raindrops on the panes...
...it was something on the side of life to feed a stick or two of white birch into the glowing firebox on the winter range...
...Why are we so haunted and beset by the future...
...And I wrote "spring ploughing" on the pad by the telephone...
...Everywhere the waterfalls tumbled down their rocky stairs in a headlong rush and smother of white...
...and why not be honest and say that we hear and read so much about them that the said woes and hangnails do not always register...
...It was a fine, living sight...
...But let them take care not to let the future overshadow all other time relations and remember that if a present is well-managed, a future will largely take care of itself...
...The wet earth had had a day of sunlight in which to warm up and dry, and the wind was warm over the warm earth...
...Letting my mind wander further afield, I began to wonder why "the Golden Age" which in the past had always been a part of the past, had in our time been whisked about in perspective and projected into the future...
...Well, I happen to think the destruction of a real sense of feeling by loading too much oh the emotions a bad thing...
...May all good agricultural deities prosper these fields...
...Elizabeth sat at the table in the sunshine, writing down a short list of the supplies we should have to get at Linwood Palmer's grocery...
...He likes to have some attention, too," said our friends...
...My strawberry beds have come through in good style, and I did not lose one of the 10 grapevines I am testing for our climate...
...All the ponds and rivers were open, and the salt bay was having its annual visitation by returning flocks of Canadian geese...
...Passing close by, a honking line of some 22 birds flew alongside my ear on the sunny day, and I saw them now against the new grass of a huge field, now against the steely sunshine of the bordering salt river...
...it poured through the kitchen windows...
...They had been penned at one side of the barn in a comfortable, straw-strewn enclosure, whilst father ram had also been sheltered from the weather in a nearby pen of his own...
...I used to see such figures on old-fashioned mantles when I was a small boy...
...A former editor of The Atlantic Monthly and The Living Age, he is the author of many books, including "Full Speed Ahead," "Starlight Wonder Book," "The Outermost House," "The Book of Gallant Vagabonds," "Herbs and The Earth," and "The St...
...It was the good, the cheerful, and the blessed "Now," and to use the words of Commodore Vander-bilt, the future be damned...
...Those of our friends who kept sheep had been through the lambing time, and only an evening or two before we had been taken out into a neighbor's barn to see the new arrivals of the spring...
...The sun shone out-of-doors...
...There they were, the mothers and the new lambs, bleating and baa-ing under electricity's always artificial light, the mothers staring at us out of their agate eyes, the lambs running about or suddenly diving under and nursing...
...Gathered by the table in farm kitchens, whole families sat together and washed and packed eggs while the rain fell, grey, unceasing, and forlorn...
...everywhere the field brooks, swollen to minor rivers, went eddying and streaming towards the neighboring sea...
...The whole world Had a pleasant fragrance of early Summer, and all of us here were part of the being and the mystery of the world...
...at us...
...Every now and then the ram lifted up a head like Aries in the zodiac, and blew a most stentorian baa...
...Selfish old rustic that I am, I just felt fed up with other people's woes, injustices, and hangnails...
...Such days of sunshine, moreover, as did break the pattern were all precarious...
...The sun shines as I write, and the clock ticks...
...II Then came a first day without rain...
...At the next farm our kind neighbor Louise Winchenbaugh was hanging clothes on a line...
...Of course, men must have a sense of the future...
...One could do no outdoor work, and it made one restless to stay indoors...
...Finally, the only emotion left to which people react is hate, and that is a perilous diet...
...It felt good to be near the kitchen stove...
...Country Chronicle Return of the Miracle By HENRY BESTON Nobleboro, Maine SO OVERCLOUDED, rainy, cold, and cheerless was the Spring that one felt that another wet and dismal day would see the state sink at its moorings...
Vol. 15 • June 1951 • No. 6
