The Rural Life (16 page)

I
n late April a neighbor harrowed and seeded our pasture with a mixture of orchard grass, bird’s-foot trefoil, clover, and
rye. For weeks I looked out on a field that was uniformly brown, all its undulations exposed to view. In the silence that
ensued when planting was done, I imagined a flock of starlings—a soot-storm of birds—landing on that newly planted soil and
devouring every seed. That didn’t happen. But as the days passed and the bare earth remained bare, I began to fear I’d neglected
some vital organic precondition—a trace mineral, perhaps. Then a blush of green appeared. It was visible only if you looked
across the field, and not too directly either. Faint stars at night are more easily seen if you don’t stare right at them,
and the same was true of the green in that field. The new shoots seemed to retire from sight if you stood right over them,
questioning.

Now the pasture has been mowed once and refenced, and last night I let the horses wander through it for an hour, hock-deep
in green grass. Instead of stopping to graze in any single spot, they walked briskly with their heads down, snatching a mouthful
here and there as they moved. July is a month when the profusion of nature seems unbelievable, more abundant than the most
verdant January daydream. The embankment bordering the gravel road is an indiscriminate, tufted mass of green. When I reset
the steel T-posts around the pasture, I found a white-spun cocoon under every insulator. A caucus of earwigs had convened
in the hollow behind a plastic insulator nailed to a black locust post. I took down a tent that had been standing at the edge
of the woods and found that, near the summit of the tent dome, tiny ants had nested in a section of fiber-glass tent pole.
It was full of eggs.

In an essay called “Huckleberries,” written in 1861, Henry Thoreau wrote, “Let us try to keep the new world new, and while
we make a wary use of the city, preserve as far as possible the advantages of living in the country.” Thoreau was talking
about the need to preserve wild land not only in remote districts, but in the immediate neighborhood of our towns, to set
aside “common possession” in rivers, waterfalls, lakes, hills, cliffs, and even “single ancient trees.” “I do not think him
fit,” Thoreau said, “to be the founder… of a town who does not foresee the use of these things, but legislates, as it were,
for oxen chiefly.”

I admit that in my pasture I’ve been legislating for oxen. I understand Thoreau’s broader point. I remain wary of the city
and well aware of the advantages of living in the country. But in July, when the forest closes overhead and the air hums with
the unceasing drone of insects and the pasture thickens daily underfoot, it’s hard not to feel that the new world has indeed
become new again. Nature does its part with an exuberance that chastens all of us.

N
o lot is too small for delusions of grandeur. I’m thinking of Wemmick, the law clerk in Dickens’s
Great Expectations.
His house in Walworth “was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted
like a battery mounted with guns.” Behind the house and its drawbridge lived a pig and fowls and rabbits. There was a cucumber
frame and an ornamental lake with a fountain, which “played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite
wet.” To Pip, the young hero of that novel, Wemmick said, “I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber,
and my own gardener, and my own Jack of All Trades.”

And when it comes to delusions of grandeur, I’m thinking of myself too, and of the nearly five acres that surround this house—ledges
of rock, stands of hardwood, and open pasture. A garden is a form of managed competition, but in what remained of ours, after
four years of neglect, the gloves had been removed and the ornamentals were duking it out. In a bed along the stone portico,
the peonies and phlox overcame the daffodils in late spring and were now suffocating a few goosenecks and bee balms. Poppies
straggled through a carpet of snow-on-the-mountain, and in front of the kitchen deck azaleas jostled against each other like
cattle in a loading chute. A lilac had vaulted the roofline. The forsythia had gone insane. Where there had once been a kitchen
garden, we found a few plastic plant labels—peppers mostly—littering the ground beneath a voracious thicket of mint. Everywhere
the cultivars were losing to the wild species, to sumac and wild grape and wild cucumber and bindweed.

With all the clearing and pruning we had to do, not to mention waiting to see what would come up on its own, I still found
myself, in April, planning a vegetable garden where I could sun myself in mid-July and say, as Wemmick did, “If you can suppose
the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions.” When a demolition crew tore out the
old fences, they improved the drainage in the barnyard by scraping away some topsoil, which they gathered and spread in the
lee of a stone embankment, where I wanted my garden to grow. It was fertile stuff, loam of loams. I set a bench beside that
quadrangle of intense, naked soil and began a beehive nearby, in the partial shade of an elderberry. The quality of my day-dreams
was superb.

Now it’s late July, and I can’t imagine where the time went. I got busy putting up horse fence and trying not to think about
the roof or the siding on the house. When I thought about the vegetable garden again, it was just a couple of days ago. I
missed pea-planting time this year—early April, the soil cold but workable—and the next time I looked up I had a garden full
of purple deadnettle, stinging nettles, pale smartweed, common St.-John’s-wort, and spotted touch-me-not, with a border of
burdock and an occasional vervain thrown in. I understood for the first time that there’s such a thing as defensive gardening,
that planting corn and tomatoes and onions is also a way of forestalling the spread of unwanted species. If you don’t plant,
the earth will bear anyhow.

Until this summer, I’d never heard of spotted touch-me-not, which is also called jewelweed and whose botanical name is
Impatiens capensis.
It has a delicate slipper-shaped flower—orange, spotted, almost Shakespearean—which dangles from a slender stalk.
Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide
calls the stem of the plant “succulent,” a word which applied to roast fowl means “mouth-watering,” but which used in reference
to spotted touch-me-not means something like “sickeningly replete with plant juice.” The name touch-me-not is ironic, when
you consider that the sap of this plant is often used to ease the irritation of poison ivy. The name comes from the fruit,
“a plump pod,” says Newcomb, “that explodes when ripe.” In other words, trouble. Profligate trouble too, judging from the
quantity of spotted touch-me-not that grows here.

I sat on the back porch one morning with a cup of coffee, trying not to look at the decrepit porch posts. A tendril of wild
cucumber spiraled upward from the branch of a peach tree. I walked down to the peach and removed the vine. I followed a path
mown through the weeds to the beehive. On the way, I tugged reflectively upon a spotted touch-me-not. It came up easily. An
hour and a half later, I had pulled up one of the jewelweed jungles on this place, succulence oozing from the stems, which
do extract easily if you lift straight up. If you tug at an angle, they snap off at their bulbous joints with a sound like
stale celery being broken. These are the kinds of things you learn when you pursue the illogic of owning an old house. You
solve small problems as they come to your attention in hopes that the big problems will solve themselves.

In the ragged, harsh light of noon, the house and grounds look starkly flawed. But as the light tarries into a long July evening,
I find myself counting the months and years we’ve been here and marveling at the changes that have taken place in that time.
What still impresses me are the things that impressed me when we first came here—the sugar maples riding on a ridge of stone
between two pastures, the grace of the hickories that surround the house, the soft-shoe strut of the turkeys as they come
down from the woods. But the work we’ve done, reseeding pasture, rationalizing the fences, planting roses and apples and pears,
begins to factor into my pleasure more and more. And what I notice now is that while the life around it swells with summer,
rising and ebbing like a green tide, the house stands firm on its footing of stone, almost indifferent. While the herbage
around it riots on midsummer nights—the wisteria fingering every weakness in foundation and porch—the house, like its owners,
quietly adds another to its load of years.

T
he second cutting of hay has been postponed because the farmers can’t get into the fields. If August goes on the way July
has, the horses will have to eat hostas, which have never looked more prosperous. Everything fungal is having a high time
of it. On yet another wet morning, with the rain disguised temporarily as fog, the bees hung in sodden mats from the hive
entrances. The sky has been the color of auto primer all week long. The old metaphors for night’s arrival fail. It doesn’t
“come,” it doesn’t “fall.” The sun doesn’t “set.” The clouds merely obtrude themselves until darkness is complete. The dogs,
who are photosensitive for food, expect five o’clock supper at noon.

And so July ended. It’s been like living under a rhubarb leaf. In parts of the Northeast, the month’s average rainfall fell
in a single day, disbelief rising like water in the storm drains as hour after hour passed with no letup, the runoff gouging
out driveways and washing out fields, stunting already stunted corn. The average daily temperature for July was colder than
normal by nearly 4½ degrees in New York City, or colder by nearly 8½ degrees than last July, when we were all complaining
about the insufferable heat. It goes to show how finely attuned to normal the human organism really is, what keen thermostats
we keep within us. At the same time, it makes normal seem like an unapproachable ideal, a figment of the statistician’s imagination.

At a certain point, no matter how long it rains, you just have to give up and go with it. I weed in the rain and pick blackberries
and blueberries in the rain. I’ve seen people mowing in the rain, wearing bright yellow slickers and moving quickly to keep
the blades from jamming with wet grass. I harvested the garlic in the garden not long ago and then found myself wondering
where I could possibly hang it to dry. Walking up the sunken road that runs past our house, I came upon a great blue heron
airing its feet on the gravel crown. A red-tailed hawk hung mewing in the current high overhead, just to feel the breeze.

Above the hawk and above the cloud cover the sun is shining brightly, tipping now toward evening and Scorpio’s rise. I think
of a kind of photomachy going on up there, a struggle between light and dark, the sun trying to pierce the clouds, while the
clouds, infinitely mutable, block the sun’s energies. It’s something Rubens would paint, a masterpiece of effulgence and protuberance,
a Baroque battle scene in whose shadow the ordinary lives of ordinary people go steadily on, while they wait to see how it
will all turn out.