Monthly Archives: November 2014

Collis in the potato field.

agriculture, quotes,

To support his country’s part in World War II John Stewart Collis wormasked to work in Britain’s Land Army. “Since it was clear to me that I would be given some home job for which I should be entirely unfitted, I asked to be excused in favor of agriculture.”

While he did quite a bit of forestry work as part of this commitment, The Worm Forgives the Plough is the book that tells of the subsequent farming experience, and that is what I am currently reading.

Though I am the daughter of a farmer, I think my only direct farming experience was to pick lemons a few times and drive a tractor a few yards at a time between the rows. Until I had my own patch of ground to become acquainted with after I married, I was somewhat like Collis, more linked to academia than to the earth.

It’s always a pleasure to find someone who is able to write, and who wants to write about farming. Reading him I am reminded of Victor Davis Hanson, another member of academia who is also a true farmer, and can articulate the practical matters and heart’s realities that perhaps most farmers just deal with, often silently. Coming “from outside” he also has a perspective slightly broader that can appreciate the humor and relate farm work to life in other parts of society.

Even though reading about the land and agricultural work will never replace actual participation in that process, I want to post some of my favorite passages from Collis as I vicariously join him on the farm. Here’s one:

I had only been working on the land a question of weeks, but one morning as I went past the potato field I realized with what fresh eyes I now could see a field, this field. It was no longer just a bit of earth the beauty of which I perceived from the outside. I saw it a hundred times more clearly, it was a hundred times more real. For I had sown it with potash and superphosphate. I had walked up and down it endlessly. I had counted the minutes nearer the midday meal, I had tried to plough it, I had put down potatoes in the furrows. Already I was no longer an onlooker, a spectator, excluded as if by excommunication from its factual and actual existence. I no longer hung in the void, but had entered in at the door of labour and become part of the world’s work in its humblest and yet proudest place.

Our Kind of Fall

my garden, , ,

Reading as many blogs as I do has the subtle effect oP1110742crpf making me want to bring my neighborhood in line with the music that autumn plays in most other places. For example, I found a November poem that is all about the violent wind, when we usually have to wait a month or two later for that sort of thing. It didn’t fit with my reality.

It’s definitely Fall here, but our notes sing a quieter background harmony, linking us more obviously to summer. Even the window art at the grocery store is mostly sunflowers to go with the pumpkins and turkeys.

All of the pictures from my garden were taken on this sixth day of November. A strawberry is ripe, as “ripe” as ornamentals get, but is decorated by a few of the telltale fallish pine needles that are slowly covering everything in that part of the yard.

P1110775sunsugar or sungold 11-6-14

The sign for the orange cherry tomato is hiding deep under the exploding foliage, and I can’t remember if it is a Sungold or a Sunsugar, but the fruit is still ripening, and nearly as sweetly as a month ago.

P1110737 Nov 1 14 sky

Mr. Glad stopped us on the way to Vespers last week to take this picture of clouds in a blue sky. Not rain clouds, sad to say. The grass has that November look, from having dried up and then been rained on a little, not enough to create any new green color. Our autumn is drier than usual, which is a hard kind of gentleness.

The furnace has been turned on, which means that we keep the windows closed, though with the days mild, and the air so fresh and soothing, I wish we could have them open. I just have to go fully out of doors if I want to get into the natural atmosphere.

It’s still not really cold enough to have a wood fire, and we haven’t had a frost yet, as you can tell from the tomatoes.

P1110774

These are the hens and chicks near the new planting bed out front. I set out all the new ground-cover starts this week, and some of the thyme is blooming still.

October is the month to plant peas of any sort, and this year I bought sweet pea (those are the flowers) and snow pea seeds, but I never got around to actually putting them in the ground, which means that the failed flowering fennel and the nasturtiums are free to paint an impressionistic scene. The background music is called “Flowery Fall.”

 

The way her hair falls.

poetry,

Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

— Li-Young Lee