SUMMER RIPENESS
Borland, Hal
Summer Ripeness by Hal Borland July is the year's high noon, midsummer, and virtually a season unto itself. Now the ant and the bee and even the awkward beetle put the busy countryman to shame for...
...By now the season's trend is clear, whether spring was early or late, whether May was wet or dry...
...By mid-October we will welcome hard frost and the end of the growing season...
...We just don't believe in that kind of thing...
...And that is where the dreams come in...
...In effect, it asks only that the big problems be solved so that a man can take care of the little ones for himself...
...But because I am a sentient creature endowed with the capacity for thought, and blessed with dreams, I can persist and even have my own importance for a brief span of time as an individual...
...Any June is full of promise, the growing strength of July's abundance...
...He probably hungered for garden salad and fresh cucumbers, too, since his cucumbers usually "came to table" by July 8. I suppose the Declaration of Independence could have been written in December or January, but I am sure it would have been a somewhat different document even though Jefferson had written it...
...We are going to renovate the town hall, but we will do it on our own...
...I am outnumbered on every hand...
...But miracles lose their wonder when even the laity can predict them, as the shamans learned long, long ago...
...Thirty miles from here is a manufacturing town where a couple of plants have laid off quite a few workers...
...Ideologies are essentially matters for indoor theorizing, but freedom and independence walk the fields and stand on the hilltops...
...Revised and completed, the Declaration was finally passed and approved by the Continental Congress on July 4. Jefferson, by the way, bought a thermometer that day and noted that the temperature at nine p.m...
...If I am wise, I can even maintain a degree of freedom not only among my own kind but upon the earth...
...It consists in paying your own way as a part of the price of freedom...
...A man can live with summer...
...Corn is shooting up and oats are beginning to head...
...And, "If we refuse, maybe some other town will, too...
...I am just another fleck of life in an environment that teems with life...
...It was June 7, 1776, when Richard Henry Lee, who called himself a Virginia farmer, laid before the Continental Congress a resolution that the colonies be considered free and independent...
...Somebody's going to spend it...
...Milkweed comes to blossom with a tuberose scent for the evening air...
...Algae will soon begin to scum the muddy ponds, and then will come the dog-days, sluggish with August...
...The land that Jefferson knew well and loved so completely was burgeoning...
...Some of us will...
...and several million others will be celebrating a long weekend holiday made properly grim by the grisly forecasts of the National Safety Council...
...is a plea for a man's right to provide such things for himself and be free and secure in them...
...And the earth has no concern with my human problems, none whatever...
...They knew the land...
...The Declaration was printed as a broadside and first read in public on July 8. That day he bought a barometer to take with the thermometer back to Monticello and make systematic observations of the daily weather...
...Jefferson, who was chosen to write the text, was a muddy-boots farmer who knew soil and crops and who even invented a new and better plow...
...There is insect drone, frog creak, starlight, the rhythmic wash of the tides, the sigh of wind in the trees...
...I do not...
...Maybe it was, in a sense, but that calls for a definition of what it is that dies so hard here in these old hills...
...Brooks begin to languish in midsummer slack and rivers are tepid and lazy...
...We are in a distressed area...
...That isn't the point...
...Among his other books are "This Hill, This Valley" and "Beyond Your Doorstep...
...That seemed to fit right into the program...
...I won't try to give a full definition, but I must point to some of the things that are still cherished here...
...July possesses the land...
...He can feel that he is a partner in its achievements, albeit a definitely junior partner...
...We can pay our own way...
...I suppose it boils down to a belief in the old virtues, and one of those virtues goes way back...
...Maybe even old-fashioned...
...Then I know that this earth really belongs to no man...
...July, after all, is a kind of summary of the year's first half...
...Wasn't there some public project that could be started here...
...It is not a demand for three meals a day and a roof overhead...
...In winter a man hugs the fire, thinks of comfort and security, and wonders if his supply of meat and hay will last out the season...
...Well, we seem to be in a distressed area...
...Nobody at the meeting really objected to spending money when it is needed...
...We still have the venerable town-meeting form of government, and all such proposals must be discussed in public and decided by the vote of those at the meeting...
...As it stands—and has stood, a beacon for freedom-hungry people for 187 years—the Declaration cuts through to fundamental matters, forthright as the season itself...
...We can refuse to take it, can't we...
...He doesn't have to wall and shield himself from it...
...Fledglings are on the wing...
...Copyright © 1963 by Hal Borland...
...The selectmen called a town meeting...
...So it was mid-June when the committee got down to work...
...The materials for his independence are all around him...
...was 73.5 degrees...
...Why was this money available...
...We don't need it," one man said curtly...
...Once we have passed the solstice, we are on the long incline that leads to October and the falling leaf...
...You might even call it another kink in the Gordian knot of the farm surplus problem if you want to spend the rest of the summer arguing politics and economics...
...We aren't in distress...
...Daylight begins to shorten...
...But I shall be thinking about the Declaration and the way it came into being...
...that I, or anyone else, can live here in relative comfort if I work at it, but in the end I belong to the earth, not the other way round...
...And another man said, "The money's there, already appropriated...
...A small matter of independence came up in my area, a few weeks back, which may demonstrate this point...
...Still another is integrity—we have to live with ourselves and we still have moral and financial conscience...
...The resolution was passed three days later, and a committee of five was named to draft a declaration to that effect...
...But if a man is willing to live with it, not try to dictate to it, he makes out surprisingly well...
...How come...
...The days seemed, as they still seem, specially shaped for a man to till and prepare the harvest that will insure his safety and independence...
...Pastures are lush...
...Another is independence and self-sufficiency...
...But with the dream there is humanity and, in flashes now and then, something we call understanding...
...The first hay has been cut and cured...
...It was not a particularly big meeting, but from the start it was an outspoken one...
...Part of this, I am sure, is because in a few more days we shall be observing the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence...
...By the time June is merging with July, his world is as big as all outdoors, and a man asks only uninterrupted time for his harvest...
...Without argument and unanimously, the same meeting approved a request for $2,500 for a new, fireproof door for the vital records vault and another for $4,000 to cover a deficit in the snow-removal budget for last winter...
...But the jubilance of June has settled into the stridulant insistence of the hot-weather insects...
...One thing is pride in self...
...The change that has come over this earth since April would be incredible if we did not see it happen every year and know it is as inevitable as sunrise...
...The sun, as we say, is already edging southward once more...
...Bird song has lost its earlier exultance...
...If the same proposal were to come up in July, I doubt that there would be even those two dissenting votes...
...The meadow margins are still white with daisies, but the orange splashes of black-eyed susans begin to appear, vivid as a van Gogh brush stroke...
...We were no longer house-bound and we may have been a bit cantankerous in our feeling of independence...
...I suspect that Jefferson knew that details of ideology were less important than a man's right to cut his hay, tend his corn, harvest his oats, butcher his hog, and be beholden to no one...
...Queen Anne's lace is like a froth at the country roadside...
...Summer supplies its own correctives...
...but a cornfield in Iowa is just another crop maturing, another consequence of a farmer cooperating with the soil and the season...
...That makes us eligible for this money...
...It is a matter of statistics...
...The timing may have been dictated by other reasons, which I am sure the historians can cite, but any countryman must believe that the season had something to do with it...
...The season actually begins to lean toward autumn by July, though we are always reluctant to admit it...
...As a countryman whose only corn crop is sweet corn for my own table, Summer Ripeness by HAL BORLAND I always come to July with a special ssnse of independence...
...It was a gesture, really, and some people, even here, say it was the work of a group of die-hards...
...The wood thrush still sings its simple contralto song in the twilight, the whip-poorwill is loud and insistent in the late dusk, and fireflies freckle the night...
...Down in Washington they chart these things on a map, area by area, and we are in that distressed area, on the map...
...But right now, in July, we exult in summer, admitting that it is the power and the glory of the earth itself...
...It just happened that there was a public project on the books, repairs and renovation of our town hall...
...Why shouldn't we...
...In July, with summer all around us, we are even more cantankerously independent than we are in April or May...
...If he gets too arrogant, a July thunderstorm claps his ears or a tornado makes him think twice about the degree of his omnipotence...
...Perhaps that is why Thomas Jefferson mustered the words he did with summer ripening in the country air that his whole being was aware of...
...We are still doing the late spring chores, mending fence, cutting brush along the pasture margins, plowing the corn land...
...Of these five men, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and John Adams were close enough to the land to call themselves farmers in one degree or another...
...If ever I realize how completely I am merely a squatter here, a tenant whose paper deed has no validity except among men, it is in July...
...it HAL BORLAND, who writes the editorials on nature for The New York Times, is the author of the current best-selling novel, "When the Legends Die...
...We were urged to apply for the money and get going...
...Anyway, a suggestion came through from the Federal public works people in Washington that government money was available and couldn't we use some of it...
...Outdoor chores, where a man can see the height of the hills and the breadth of the horizon, feel the earth underfoot and sense the turn of the seasons...
...That just seemed to set things off...
...July, midsummer, is hospitable to the dream...
...It turned into an indignation meeting, and when the vote was finally taken only two voters wanted to accept the government money...
...To a countryman, standing now in the richness of another July, that is explanation enough...
...So Thomas Jefferson, a farmer, a man in his thirty-fourth year, hungry for his acres while the solstice passed, sat in a stuffy Philadelphia room and drafted the document which begins, "When, in the course of human events," and closes, "with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor...
...The hours are long and sweat comes easily...
...but it always has been difficult to build anything enduring, including freedom and security, without a good deal of hard work, and nobody has yet invented a better lubricant for the gears of human achievement than sweat...
...What is a dream but an exaltation, a reaching beyond the limits of everyday reality...
...That, as I say, happened a few weeks back, when we hadn't yet planted corn, when summer was just a promise...
...By now a countryman can gauge his prospects and, if he is of a philosophical turn of mind, weigh his own wisdom and evaluate the validity of his purposes...
...Without the dream, what is there...
...I shall be staying home, cherishing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a simple, rural way...
...One sprouting kernel of corn is an astonishing, marvelous thing...
...The proposal was turned down, overwhelmingly...
...Now the ant and the bee and even the awkward beetle put the busy countryman to shame for a sluggard, and the quiet chlorophyll in the green leaf makes man's fissioned atom a puny force by comparison...
...Back in April we were glad to see the end of winter...
...And, "It doesn't make sense, asking for money just because it is there...
...By July the land itself challenges a man to stand up and proclaim his manhood...
...What was objected to was the needless spending of public money and the bureaucratic habit of urging funds on a town that did not need help...
...By the end of June any provident Virginia farmer has fryers ready for the pan, new potatoes ready for the pot, and fresh garden peas on the table...
...In a sense, July is January's dream of perfection...
...The hopes, the dreams, of men who knew summer on the land came to a proper ripeness in those words...
Vol. 27 • July 1963 • No. 7
