COUNTRY CHRONICLE
Beston, Henry
Country Chronicle By HENRY BESTON NOW that the clocks have been turned back, and we no longer have "war-time" in the dark of Winter, something is again part of our lives that had been wrenched a...
...The postwar world, I gather, is going to be a world whose ideal is a fantastically unnatural human passivity...
...Farm Diary In the lower field I see the Mrs...
...It is a red fox running at an easy dog-trot on the far side of the trees...
...That bold challenge to life, hails the ever-increasing day...
...I have known them to arrive in small groups, the birds at great distances from one another in the autumnal sky...
...Here in the north, it is a kind of folk-custom that the man build the morning fires, and I, for one, like the custom and the task...
...Soaring in great spirals,, he presently dwindles to a speck high in the blue, and there vanishes...
...1 heard the fire begin to roar, closed the front draft, and went out to the barn...
...Hope we shall soon be able to get good overalls again...
...What a dreadful future...
...The golden-red light of the early sun fell full upon them, giving a particular glow to their russet hides...
...During the- war so many women worked in war plants that the makers produced a sort of androgynous...
...Somehow or other I. can't seem to work up much of an interest in the stories and articles: what sets me to wondering is the basic appeal of practically all the advertisements...
...The shadows of the farm chimneys tower and slant into the west field, the shadow of wood smoke soon to be seen rolling off and blurring on the grass...
...Crows caw from the old pasture, and presently the fine crow of a rooster...
...an alarm...
...Field and tree, heavy with dew, are just beginning to keep company with the sutk The cold air is sweet, no wind moves, and as one first looks and listens, there is perhaps no* sound...
...It is the ideal, I think, of people who have never been alive, who know neither the body nor the soul...
...What has come back to our lives is the true and lovely beginning of a really human day...
...This morning as I stood in the shed door, I saw three deer in the field beyond the lawn, and scarce 200 feet away...
...What twist of the spirit has created this passive paradise as the future of man, this fungus world of existence to be lived without effort...
...My small dog had pressed open the door and gone, out to look for me...
...I am glad that the clock has had a change of heart...
...As for physical inaction held up as a han-py expectation, that is either laziness or death...
...We are to spend our lives in cushioned easy chajrs, growing fat and languid as jellyfish, while intricate slave-mechanisms do everything for us as we loll, nractically helping us breathe and hygienically blowing our noses...
...There are so many things to see in the early morning and there is no more magical hour...
...The Mrs...
...Something is moving in the little, erchard to the north...
...three heads stared at the house...
...Compromises and defenses are natural and right...
...wandering about with a strawberry basket gathering the wild cranberries...
...A friend who spent a night with us brought them with" him, and left them for us on the parlor table...
...What normal human being would ever want such a gruesome existence...
...For a few slow seconds, the group, still motionless, responded to a common curiosity.-This mood dissolving, uneasiness turned to immediate action, up went the fine, nonsensical plume-tails, and away bounded my visitors across the dewy stubble to the dense shelter of the pines...
...No, I do not mean that we should take' the hardest way...
...Every now and then when the light comes at the right angle, there is a gleam of white tail-feathers...
...Three bodies stood still...
...I once innocently purchased such a pair, and as I am a rather lean down-easter, what they did to my figure I remember with a blush...
...Pa-and-Ma garment cut wide in the hip» and ample elsewhere...
...it was a picture from a fairy tale...
...Country Chronicle By HENRY BESTON NOW that the clocks have been turned back, and we no longer have "war-time" in the dark of Winter, something is again part of our lives that had been wrenched a little out of place—the early morning...
...It is an eagle hi<?h above the pond...
...But wait...
...Our cranberry is not the marsh cranberry of commerce but the "mountain cranberry" or "rock cranberry" of the north...
...IHAVE been looking at a number of the big...
...Eayles who have summered bv the northern lakes drift down to the sea in Autumn and follow the coast to the south...
...Keeping together in a group, the creatures stood in the peace and silence of the early Winter morning, their heads lowered to the grass and nuzzling about...
...I think I'd better bring in some kindling...
...When "war-time" ruled, we went to bed by starlight, and by starlight rose, the farms getting the school children up by lamps, and hurrying them out to the honking school-bus before the earth itself was comfortably awake...
...luxurious, colored-inset magazines...
...She had been living in our woods all Summer...
...calls out to me from the field and lifts a finger to the sky...
...But heaven help us if we try to escape all actual contact with the waywardness of "the wind and the rain...
...It was a pretty doe with well-grown twin fawns...
...A wonderful opportunity for a didactic lecture on the varying positions of the Great Dipper, but somehow or other life concerned itself with Johnny's scarf and Almira's rubbers...
...I look at the outside temperature before I lay my kindling, and there, beyond the door, lies the true morning of the world...
...Winter "war-time" in the country was a piece of moonshine...
...It grows in trailing patches...
...in the fields, and makes an excellent sauce...
...A human being protected from normal hardship simply never lives...
...The day had begun...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 50
