Part 6

But you cannot dump your winter and send it off to sea. There is no cure for winter in a tip-cart; no cure in the city. There is consolation in the city, for there is plenty of company in the misery. But company really means more of the misery. If life is to be endured, if all that one can do with winter is to shovel it and suffer it, then to the city for the winter, for there one’s share of the shoveling is small, and the suffering there seems very evenly distributed.

Here on the farm is neither shoveling nor suffering, no quarrel whatever with the season. Here you have nothing to do with its coming or going further than making preparation to welcome it and to bid it farewell. You slide, instead, with your boys; you do up the chores early in the short twilight, pile the logs high by the blazing chimney and—you remember that there is to be a lecture to-night by the man who has said it all in his book; there is to be a concert, a reception, a club dinner, in the city, sixteen blissful miles away,—and it is snowing! You can go if you have to. But the soft tapping on the window-panes grows faster, the voices at the corners of the house rise higher, shriller. You look down at your slippers, poke up the fire, settle a little deeper into the big chair, and beg Eve to go on with the reading.

And she reads on—

Shut in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed.

* * * * *

And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons’ straddling feet, The mug of cider simmered slow, The apples sputtered in a row, And, close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from brown October’s wood.

But you will be snow-bound in the morning and cannot get to town? Perhaps; but it happened so only twice to me in the long snowy winter of 1904. So twice we read the poem, and twice we lived the poem, and twice? yes, a thousand times, we were glad for a day at home that wasn’t Sunday, for a whole long day to pop corn with the boys.

A farm, of all human habitations, is most of a home, and never so much of a home as in the winter when the stock and the crops are housed, when furrow and boundary fence are covered, when earth and sky conspire to drive a man indoors and to keep him in,—where he needs to stay for a while and be quiet.

No problem of city life is more serious than the problem of making in the city a home. A habitation where you can have no garden, no barn, no attic, no cellar, no chickens, no bees, no boys (we were allowed one boy by the janitor of our city flat), no fields, no sunset skies, no snow-bound days, can hardly be a home. To live in the fifth flat, at No. 6 West Seventh Street, is not to have a home. Pictures on the walls, a fire in the grate, and a prayer in blending zephyrs over the door for God to bless the place can scarcely make of No. 6 more than a sum in arithmetic. There is no home environment about this fifth flat at No. 6, just as there is none about cell No. 6, in the fifth tier of the west corridor of the Tombs.

The idea, the concept, home, is a house set back from the road behind a hedge of trees, a house with a yard, with flowers, chickens, and a garden,—a country home. The songs of home are all of country homes:—

How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood When fond recollection presents them to view:

* * * * *

The gutter, the lamp-post, the curb that ran by it, And e’en the brass spigot that did for a well.—

Impossible! You cannot sing of No. 6, West Seventh, fifth flight up. And what of a home that cannot be remembered as a song! It is not a home, but only a floor over your head, a floor under your feet, a hole in the wall of the street, a burrow into which you are dumped by a hoisting machine. It is warm inside; Eve is with you, and the baby, and your books. But you do not hear the patter of the rain upon the roof, nor the murmur of the wind in the trees; you do not see the sun go down beyond the wooded hills, nor ever feel the quiet of the stars. You have no largeness round about you; you are the centre of nothing; you have no garden, no harvest, no chores,—no home! There is not room enough about a city flat for a home, nor chores enough in city life for a living.

For a man’s life consisteth not in an abundance of things, but in the particular kind and number of his chores. A chore is a fragment of real life that is lived with the doing. All real living must be lived; it cannot be bought or hired. And herein is another serious problem in city life,—it is the tragedy of city life that it is so nearly all lived for us. We hire Tom, Dick, and Harry to live it; we buy it of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. It is not so here on the farm; for here one has the full round of life’s chores, and here, on a professor’s salary, one may do all the chores himself.

We may hire our praying and our thinking done for us and still live; but not our chores. They are to the life of the spirit what breathing and eating and sleeping are to the life of the body. Not to feed your own horse is to miss the finest joy of having a horse,—the friendship of the noble creature; not to “pick up” the eggs yourself, nor hoe your own garden, nor play with your own boys! Why, what is the use of having boys if you are never going to be “it” again, if you are not to be a boy once more along with them!

There are some things, the making of our clothes, perhaps, that we must hire done for us. But clothes are not primitive and essential; they are accidental, an adjunct, a necessary adjunct, it may be, but belonging to a different category from children, gardens, domestic animals, and a domestic home. And yet, how much less cloth we should need, and what a saving, too, of life’s selvage, could we return to the spinning-wheel and loom as we go back to the farm and the daily chores!

She, harvest done, to char work did aspire, Meat, drink, and twopence were her daily hire.

And who has not known the same aspiration? has not had a longing for mere chores, and their ample compensation? It is such a reasonable, restful, satisfying aspiration! Harvest done! Done the work and worry of the day! Then the twilight, and the evening chores, and the soft closing of the door! At dawn we shall go forth again until the evening; but with a better spirit for our labor after the fine discipline of the morning chores. The day should start and stop in our own selves; labor should begin and come to an end in the responsibility of the wholesome, homely round of our own chores.

Summer is gone, the harvest is done, and winter is passing on its swiftest days. So swift, indeed, are the days that morning and evening meet, bound up like a sheaf by the circle of the chores. For there is never an end to the chores; never a time when they are all done; never a day when the round of them is not to be done again. And herein lies more of their virtue as a winter cure.

Life is not busier here than elsewhere; time is not swifter, but more enjoyable, because so much of life is left unfinished and time is thrown so much more into the future. There is no past on the farm; it is all to come; no sure defeat, but always promise; no settled winter, but always the signs of coming spring.

To-day is the first of January, snowy, brilliant, but dripping with the sound of spring wherever the sun lies warm, and calling with the heart of spring yonder where the crows are flocking. There is spring in the talk of the chickadees outside my window, and in the cheerful bluster of a red squirrel in the hickory. No bluebird has returned yet: spring is not here, not quite, I hope, but it is coming, and so near that I shall drop my pen and go out to the barn to put together some new beehives, for I must have them ready for the spring. Winter! The winter is almost gone. Why, it is barely a month since I brought my bees into the cellar, and here I am taking them out again—in prospect.

The hives have just come from the factory “in the flat”: sawed, planed, dovetailed, and matched,—a delightful set of big blocks,—ready to be nailed together. You feel a bit mean, keeping them from the children. But the oldest of the boys is only six, and he had a walking bear for Christmas. Besides, when you were a little boy you never had many blocks, and never a walking bear. So you keep the hives. And how suddenly the January day goes! You hammer on into the deepening dusk, and the chickens go to roost without their supper. You would have hammered on all night, but the hives ran out. Five hives won’t last very long; and you sigh as they stand finished. You could wish them all in pieces to do over again, so smooth the stock, so fragrant the piny smell, so accurate and nice the parts from cover to bottom board!

Winter! with January started, and February two days short! It is all a fiction. You had dreams of long evenings, of books and crackling fires, and of days shut in. It still snows; there is something still left of the nights, but not half enough, for the seed catalogues are already beginning to arrive.

The snow lies a foot deep over the strawberry bed and the frozen soil where the potatoes are to be. Yet the garden grows—on paper? No, not on paper, but in your own eager soul. The joy of a garden is as real in January as in June.

And so the winter goes. For if it is not the garden and the bees, it is some of a thousand other chores that keep you busy and living past the present,—and past the present is the spring.

I am watching for the phœbes to return to the shed,—they are my first birds. I long to hear the shrill piping of the March frogs, to pick a blue hepatica from beneath the pines; for these are some of the things, besides cheaper rent, more room, more boys, fresh air, quiet, and a cow, that one lives for here on the farm. But I am not waiting, winter-sick, for I have stored the summer in attic and cellar; I am already having my spring—in prospect; and as for the actual winter, the snow-bound days are all too few for the real winter joys of this simple, ample life, here in the quiet, among the neighbor fields.

The Nature-Student