Henry Beston - The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

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Contents

TO

ROSALIND RICHARDS

FOREWORD

O UR Maine year is no halfway affair. When it is summer, it is green summer at its best, and when the northern winter deepens out of Octobers brilliance and wholesome cold, it is the old-fashioned winter with its fields of snow, its sense of wintry peace, and its splendor of blue sky. I have tried in these pages to give an account of the adventure of living as a countryman sees it who lives in the farm country between the wide Kennebec and the Penobscot, on fresh water, yet only a little inland from the sea.

To his ever thoughtful and generous friends, Editor Morris H. Rubin of The Progressive and Associate Editor Mary Sheridan, the author wishes to make grateful acknowledgment of a first and outstanding debt. He began these Country Chronicles of Maine at their suggestion; their counsel and unfailing encouragement were ever at his service, and he now owes them thanks for permission to publish this present arrangement of his work. Were he to list the Maine friends and neighbors who have helped him on his way, the roll would be almost without end. Many of their names will be found in these pages, but he wishes to make particular mention of Henry Richards Esq. of Gardiner and the other kindest friends at the Yellow House above the Kennebec.

To the Elizabeth of these pages, my wife Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston, I would offer an acknowledgment which cannot quite be set down in words.

But I hear the farm-bell ringing; someone is at the door, so putting down pencil and paper, I leave these pages to the reader.

HENRY BESTON

Chimney Farm

Lincoln County

State of Maine

I

T HE train gathered speed, and from the red plush of the day coach, I watched the city withdraw to the south, and the immense slaty-black and brownish pall of smoke thin to a brownish veil over the suburbs and the dirty snow. Houses and open spaces which were neither country nor town slid fugitively by through the winter morning, together with local wildernesses of gravel and weedy birch, and then, after a crossing and a crossing bell, came a first sight of the true snowcovered country and a barn with patterns of snow upon the roof. My own land of the deeper snowfalls and the great evergreen woods was still close upon two hundred miles away, but the train was making good time, and the morning sun had cleared the cloud bank to the east. Home. Going home.

Something over a month had passed since I had seen the red farmhouse, the winter sky of the higher north, and the frozen pond with its wavering paths of ice and snow. At Christmas we had gone up the coast to spend the holidays near kinsmen outside the city, and somehow or other a hundred things to be attended to had lengthened our stay beyond the usual time. For several weeks our life had been the life of the suburb with its old friends, its visits, and its welcomes, and now and then Elizabeth and I had gone to town. In spite of all the kindness and the good times, however, I had more than ever in my life felt unutterably homesick and uprooted. Home. Going home.

What had gone out of American life as one sees it in the city and the suburb? Essentially, thought I, musing by the window, a sense of direction. To use a metaphor, we were all of us passengers on a great ocean liner. There is plenty of food aboard, meals are served at given hours, and all goes on much the same as ever in the usual haphazard and familiar way. On the bridge there are quarrels as to who shall steer, and powerful and secret currents seize upon the keel. The pleasant-enough days go by; people read novels in sheltered corners of the deck. The ocean, however, is unknown, and no one, not a single soul, knows whither the ship is bound. Home. Going home.

Save for shelves of salt ice along its banks, the blue Kennebec was as open as any river below New York. Once across the great bridge, I scarce for a moment stopped looking out into the wooded distances, the austere air, and the increasingly brilliant day. My own country was beginning with its views down narrowing backwaters roofed with salt ice sagging with an outgoing tide and its distant glimpses of white steeple tops rising into the shining sky above the pines and snow. In one secluded cove in the woods, three black ducks had risen from a pool of open water and were flying away from the noise and roar of the train. Home. Going home.

And presently there I was, and in such a crystal splendor of light and under such a sun as I had not seen since I left the farm. A deep fall of snow about a fortnight old, having first been drenched with a mild rain, had then frozen over again with a smooth and solid crust of ice: from the pasture pines to the bounds of the horizon the entire landscape might have been dipped in a shining sea of arctic glass. Smoke rose from farm chimneys into the still air between the blue radiance above and the floors of ice, and there at a turn were the welcoming hands of my neighbors, the Olivers, and nearer the farm, the warm welcomes of Carroll and Louise, and Elaine telling me about her three months old Drusilla. How well they all looked and how cheerful, and what a pleasure it was to be hearing the neighborhood news and answering questions about Elizabeth. Home. Going home.

Above the ice of the pond, and the gleam of ice and light upon the slopes, the red farm seemed particularly serene. When I opened the door, the rooms were full of sunlight, quiet, and a sense of emptiness, yet they were welcoming too, for Carroll had with neighborly kindness kindled fires in the stoves. So still it was that all I could hear was the occasional tiny crack and twig-like snap of the coal fire. Then with a swing of the finger, I started the pendulum of the clock, and with the steady tick, the life of the house began to beat. Home again. Home.

FARM DIARY

At Carroll and Louise Winchenbaughs, the antlered head of one of last years deer looks with unseeing glance from a rafter of the older barn whilst just below in a corner pen there studies me a young, genial, and trustful pig. / Monday, and a wool washing in the farm washtubs, and the steam of wool in the kitchens and heavy wools sagging and drying on the lines. / A sudden turn of the wind to the southwest blows in a drifting mass of sea-fog; the warm billows and tatters of vapor pass low over the fields and plains of ice, and at night vast flares of lightning shake our wintry and northern world. / The closed-off rooms of the farm are just so many ice boxes, and when the full moon rises over the pond, the frost-covered windows on that side of the house become moonlit splendors from another age of time. / Snow flurries from the northwest, and a flight of snowbirds rises from the wet ground and uncovered grass about the flowing spring. / Welcome letters from Elizabeth saying to expect her on the Friday morning train.