The Sweet Kernel of May

...They lived in a kind of daze, stopped eating, were very short tempered, and yet bumped into things like trees and rocks...

...He was a man of wisdom and human understanding, Geoff Chaucer, and his Canterbury Tales are filled with the stuff of human charity and human folly...

...We do know that they keep out competition by unfair and discriminatory practices and by special privileges enacted into law...

...Oh, you can, of course...

...I live, I was trying to say when I entangled myself in other matters, on a farm in a rural valley of the New England hills, close to the land, the seasons, and the year itself...

...Unless an author's name is appended, the material appeared as editorial comment...

...Or we go on around and over Cooper's Hill, and down to the lower end of Twin Lakes, and sit by the water and watch the fishermen get sunburned necks and occasional fine, fighting trout or salmon...

...Now I know why...

...God knows, you deserve it...

...His old maid daughter took care of him at home and told her friends that he was afraid to die because he might meet his wife in the Hereafter...

...Over there in that valley there are whole vistas of swamp maples that are still deckled with crimson, the color of bud, blossom, stem and autumn leaf...

...Many of the animals also showed a shortage of blood sugar, degeneration of the liver, and changes in the whole chemistry of the blood...

...but it won't do the least good...

...Wel-come say I, too, and if more need be said to glorify the month or brighten May's floures or liven May's grenes, consider that said also...

...Maybe we live right, up here in the hills...

...There are places of "fair, fresshe May...

...January 8, 1910 MONOPOLIES It has not yet been shown that manufacturing and commercial corporations are necessary monopolies...

...All during the Crisis, which was a surprisingly successful operation even to those in charge of it, I noticed one saddening thing...

...On the High Plains, in the Rockies, in the Midlands, in the Carolinas...

...Few people today under the age of sixty have ever read it...

...More like a real lamb than a traditional one, to tell the truth...

...the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family...

...No room to be themselves, maybe...

...By turning off radio and television and depending only on the daily newspapers we do quite nicely...

...For those who hate winter, I suggest that it is worth looking up...

...I would not spare words, where May is concerned...

...Just before May we try to take a whole morning and gather the makings of a wild salad, just to prove we still can do it...

...May, and we have a choice of greens, for salad and for cooked greens...

...They didn't necessarily starve, either...

...In April we had the very early greens, winter cress, and dandelions and marsh marigolds and some nettles—we think some are fit to eat, others a waste of time...

...And here came April and the end of winter, by the calendar as well as by the almanac, the stars, and the length of daylight...

...Senator Robert M. LaFollette January 1912...

...I renew the wish, as I said I might, though I still will take them as they come...

...In the cities it was like a minor war between pirates and buccaneers, at times embellished with daggers and pistols...

...You have your corn planted before mid-May...

...I can go there from here and now...

...There often was sufficient food in the overpopulated environment, but the animals weren't eating it...

...I once knew a farmer who said the only reason he had escaped bankruptcy was because his wife could say, "Scat...

...In the villages there was a kind of neighborly accommodation, a system that kept local tanks sufficiently full and that kept strangers, even those with bribing money, at arm's length from pumps that conveniently went dry at the proper times...

...And scal-lions...

...They simply had something that could be called Crowd Syndrome...

...The forefathers endured such weather, and a poet named Whittier wrote a long, surprisingly enthusiastic poem about the joys of being snowbound...

...Not until they are spoken do those two words reveal their strange similarity of sound and not until they are written can one see their totally opposite meaning...

...The only trouble is that, as an expression of our national policy today, it is a dead letter...

...The Editors NATIONAL HOUSING POLICY A decade ago, in the Housing Act of 1949, the Congress wrote a declaration of national housing policy which said in part: "The general welfare and security of the nation . . . require...

...Right now, of course, I am not qualified to comment...

...They are better than our own asparagus, but only until the asparagus itself has sent up its second crop of cutting stalks...

...I might pause a moment right here and suggest for realists that traditional lamb is not actual lamb the way I knew lambs as a growing boy out in sheep country...

...That was the way gasoline was bought and sold in the cities and the villages...

...We always miss a few onions when we dig them in the fall, and by May they have come up in the spring greenness and slim, white bulblessness of the most tasty scallions ever grown...

...THE WAY WE SAW IT These excerpts from articles and editorials published during The Progressive's sixty-five year history have been edited only to achieve brevity...

...But the stentorian wife was drowned in the hurricane of 1955, and the farmer didn't die in the poorhouse...

...As a matter of fact, we can stay right here and take a good many trips too, remembering Mays in other places...

...There are distinctions, not always easy to keep...

...I borrowed words from Chaucer, when I began...

...And out of sight and hearing of Washington for a little while, even by radio or television bounced off a satellite...

...And their ewe-mothers were not very bright, either...

...They studied rats, squirrels, deer, even skunks, and they found that when they overpopulated their environment they were in trouble, physical and nervous trouble primarily...

...For there are places, I assure you, where May comes "with alle thy floures and thy grenes...

...March, as I was saying, went out with a sloppy, slushy snow...

...And to believe one of the rewards for living right is weather that helps us forget that New England winters traditionally are long, cold, and snowbound...

...The first crop is nearly always bitter...

...Somewhere out where grass grows, and trees, and daisies and buttercups, in due time, and horse chestnut blossoms...

...Or we go down Undermountain Road and look at the trees in fresh new leaf, leaves dainty as fine tissue and still pastel pink and yellow and green, not yet fully infused with chlorophyll, not yet ready to go to work, since the trees outlawed child labor long ago...

...Which proved again that, as my grandmother used to say, there are others ways to kill a cat than by choking it with butter...

...Not abroad in the foreign sense, to Europe or Africa or Asia or even the Mideast, but merely outside your own home or office...

...Among his books are "Country Editor's Boy," "Borland Country," "Homeland," "Countryman," and, most recently, "Seasons...

...But rationed by price, as someone's unofficial spokesman put it, but not for attribution...

...May at home, wherever home may be, is the ideal, and as the years accumulate we all reach for that, for the sweet kernel of life and time...

...That way, though nobody above the rank of third assistant doorman would admit it, the blame landed not on the big oil company, not on the Energy Administrator, not on the President or the Secretary of State, but on the owner or manager of the local filling station, down at Third and Main...

...The second crop is perfect...

...Our river, the Housatonic, again did not freeze over even once...

...And tiny, sweet radishes, little as the end of your little finger, not gross, fat and hot as a Mexican chili pepper...

...Examination of the dead animals showed changes in the glandular systems, particularly the pituitary and adrenals, the glands most affected by such emotions as fear, anger, and pain...

...I am just arrogant enough to think we do...

...And if you think people who watch and listen to such things as though they were epochal events are out there in the edge of the blue, just think what people who spend their whole lives pushing people around and beating competitors to the punch do to keep their perspective...

...Some people go for trips in May, though for the life of me I can't see why unless they live in a rich ghetto or a poor one...

...They helped supervise the lambing, which would drive eminently sane, well-balanced men into what is sometimes called the loony bin...

...There isn't much to be done for a hay field in May except hope the grass, the clover, or the alfalfa has the edge on the mustard, the field daisies, and the thistles...

...They were born as often as not in a snowstorm, and they were not always bright enough to know where their first or next meal was coming from, or even which end of their mother was the milk end...

...The exposure of railroad abuses, of corporation thievery, agitation against political corruption and misrepresentative government, the publishing of campaign contributions and manipulations, exposure of the plundering of the public domain and squandering of natural resources, holding up to the people the outrages of the tariff jobbery —of these offenses and others like them the magazines of the country have been guilty...

...So things happened to their nervous systems and, of all things, to their livers...

...But you know you can't clap hands and shout, "Scat...

...I live, as some may remember, in such a place abroad from the egocentric, politicocentric bull-ring that has the power to make war halfway across the world or to maneuver oil production and shipment and sale or to decide what is and what is not impeccable and impeachable...

...Statesmen, remember, are of one breed, politicians of another: And it matters not what season of the year they inhabit...

...Probably the sweetest lettuce ever grown anywhere, those little seedlings...

...Sheep herders, in that place and time, were generally acknowledged to be somewhat lost, mentally...

...They certainly can be compelled to stop such practices and be deprived of such privileges...

...We have had quite a parade of that kind of people through the courts and inquiring committees of Congress, and if you would like to exchange places with them, go ahead and welcome to it...

...when the clouds come and settle in for a solid week...

...We go up the road to a place called Bartholomew's Cobble, where birds and flowers and even trees are protected in something called a "public reservation," a place of natural reality that is being protected...

...I will take May Day in the country...

...When they did not, it was just too bad, unless some less fortunate ewe-mother, her own lamb lost, took a fancy to the lorn lamb, and mothered it...

...But if we would keep our sanity and our freedom we must somehow make them...

...He grew up in Colorado and now lives on a Connecticut farm in the lower Berkshires...

...May basket of hand-picked dogtooth violets, anemones, and bloodroot blossoms to my love...

...Actually, we haven't been elsewhere any distance in March or April for some time...

...Is there not some more subtle, less obvious, and equally effective method of subduing and intimidating the free and outspoken magazine press of the country...

...May, and thinnings from the lettuce bed we planted in the garden in early April...

...Hurt, they often died...

...And when we have that done we pick milkweed stems, very young ones before the leaves have opened, and we boil them gently and dredge them with butter...

...A few researchers set out to find the answers, if any were available...

...You hope May doesn't turn all rain and mud...

...Or make your own diagnosis...

...He didn't mind going to Hell direct, he said, "But I'd hate to get to heaven and have Annie shout 'Scat!' at me and go to Hell down the back stairs...

...Public servants are not politicians, either, though the one may masquerade as the other...

...with the authority of God Almighty Himself, and even the rain would stop when she told it to...

...It's just that we can lay the newspaper aside to read when we get to it, and re-read if we wish, meanwhile keeping the world in perspective by watching an oriole weaving a nest in a riverside elm, or listening to a cardinal proclaiming his presence on the garden fence, or watching a honey bee helping an apple blossom to open...

...You put the cows out on the pastureland the first week in May, most years...

...Even if we have to turn our backs, as I said earlier, and go somewhere out of sight or sound of Washington to keep our perspective, to find the truth and the substance of belief...

...But March came in like a lamb, skipped, and gamboled like late April for a time, and went out clad in dirty white snow and acting like a lamb trying to be a lion and never quite making it...

...We were not once really snowed in, or snowbound, as poet Whittier called it...

...We all do...

...But look ye abroad, say I, if you would find the fair, fresshe faith and belief that should be yours in May...

...May always brings the basic problems of the land to a point of focus...

...February at times was like traditional January...

...May is too good a time to be even anticipated from a distance...

...Which may account for some of the confusion in the public mind and the Congressional reaction, though it seems unlikely that there is any doubt at higher levels about the meaning of either word...

...Well, I seem to have my wish, and for that I am profoundly grateful...

...However, this past winter was the second in a row when our right ways of living paid dividends...

...You hope May has a lot of sun and good growing weather to get things off to a good start...

...Lambs, out there on the Colorado high plains, were not frolicsome creatures...

...Nixon calls them...

...Senator Joseph S. Clark April, 1959 INTIMIDATING THE MAGAZINES The present Postmaster General calls attention to the postal deficit and recommends an increase of the postage rates on periodicals and magazines to meet the deficit...

...Something about the two systems was not only a sad reflection on human nature but a reminder of the crowd syndrome...

...April, and gasoline even for weekenders...

...One May Day at a time...

...They bore their lambs at the most unpropitious time of early spring, and they were temperamental creatures that sometimes did, and sometimes did not, recognize and claim their own...

...Copyright © 1974 by Hal Borland...

...I live where I would go in May if I didn't live here...

...I have been there...

...An example of unfair and discriminating prices is the practice so brutally employed by the Standard Oil Company of cutting prices in local markets invaded by small competitors while keeping up prices in the markets not so invaded...

...The crowd syndrome...

...So much for the lambs of reality...

...The farmer by now has made his commitment, what he will plant and how much and where, what he will do with the hay fields that were pretty weedy last year, and what he can do with the pastures now...

...Ten years later, this statement could hardly be improved...

...January had some of April's normal attributes and little of its own traditional snow or cold...

...He wrote of a broad cross-section of the people of his age, or any age, it seems to me, but he had no good words for politicians...

...But, for heaven's sake, don't get the idea we think of radio and television as the villains our hollowed Mr...

...Go ye forth and find fair fresshe May...

...And a year ago I asked, in this space, for "just one more May Day" on which to present a homemade Hal Borland is the eminent nature writer and conservationist...

...Some years ago the biologists wondered what happened to the animals in an overcrowded environment...

...But we are like the robins, like the bluebirds and the flickers and the sassy catbirds, that come back hereabout, come May, from wherever we might have been...

...Oh, we do take trips in May, of course...