When we aren’t digging in the dirt with our hands, our family loves delving into history with our minds.  Sometimes we do both at once…don’t ask me how, but the most engaging discussions usually take place during the more simple occasions in our lives.   Yesterday in particular, Aubrey and I were puzzling over the number of yards required for an 1860’s petticoat while strong-arming ambitious weeds out from between the tomato cages.  The deliberation was not in vain, since we decided on the correct yardage and “saved,” as you might call it, some fifty aspiring tomato plants. 

As if the garden and farm were not quite enough for a summer, the eight of us recently dove heart and soul into reenacting what many call the Civil War.  Thus while we are up to our elbows in the myriad colors and tastes and smells of high summer out of doors, we are up to our knees in the living room with scissors and pins and bits of bright thread and scraps of muslin "Too narrow breadths for nought--except waistcoats for mice," as Miss Potter’s Tailor of Gloucester said. (Unfortunately, we have no mouse-friends to do midnight miracles and save us the trouble of pricked fingers and aching necks as the aforementioned tailor did.)  And amid the feathery arms of carrot tops and out from between the ranks of onions, old battle songs and rallying tunes ring across the field like echoes from tongues long-silent.

The farmer’s market stand, in the meantime, blossoms into full splendor.  If one didn’t know how little of the beauty is truly beholden to one’s own effort one might be in danger of growing remarkably proud.  Setting out the most brilliant displays of produce is a privilege for those who are not afraid to break their finger-nails and scrub the ever-loving dirt out off their hands and feet, but he who is most familiar with the soil knows full well just how much he relies on his Maker for the increase.

I speak of dirt often, when I write about the garden, mostly because I think it is inescapable.  Yet there are also things there that cannot be described well because of their beauty, nor experienced any other place.  The sublimity and grandeur of even the Grand Canyon or a broad range of mountains is frankly hard-put to be more sublime than the scenes that occur in a garden.  There in our garden I stand often on a day-brink, at the top of our path through still-dusky, sleepy woods, my feet in a misty green sea of dewy grass and my eyes blinded by the million morning suns sparkling in our apple trees, dripping and shedding diamonds. 

There, if you linger till late, the sun will bid the day adieu with a glory of blazing smiles and, sweeping up the clouds with his train, send back a final fiery flash before withdrawing behind his counterpane.  Where but in a garden can you watch the bee at his business in his velvet suit; stuffing his pockets with dusty gold from the heart of the rose?  Where but in a garden can you walk down emerald halls under an azure arch and eat freely on every side a feast of heaven’s own making? Each of us is given good gifts every day so that, surrounded as we are by the dirt we so often stir up for ourselves, we remain unable to forget the goodness of God.
Craig, Karen and the Six Arrows

When I was a little girl, Mama used to read poems from play-worn volumes, filled to the brim with lovely, captivating words and the beautiful illustrations of good artists that leapt out of the pages and smiled up at me like old friends. Those afternoons filled with our mother’s low sweet voice drawing us into a beautiful world through verse impressed on my heart a love not only for reading, but especially of the tuneless songs of language we called poetry. They turn over in my head faster than I can name them, these old favorites that steal into the mind with a kind of power of memory that comes with the well-spent golden hours of childhood. The valuable moral lessons they still sing are often indelible. I remember A Good Play (R. L. Stevenson), the kind of poem that makes you want to jump up and play with a will. In The Village Blacksmith (Longfellow) the remarkable integrity, firmness of character and purpose mixed with infinite tenderness and singular love called up the noblest of aspirations. Daddy and Mama hung My Little Sister (“I have a little sister, she is only two years old;” Unknown) on our wall so that I knew it by heart from childhood, and more often than not, considered it ruefully after being less than kind to a sibling.

The poem that fairly leapt to mind again the other day was The Wind, by Robert Louis Stevenson. We were processing chickens, not exactly the most stirring or thought-provoking of occupations, when several great gusts rushed down over the ridge and charged into our valley like an express train, wailing and roaring till the trees looked like girls tossing their hair. It was a strong wind, the rollicking kind that sends your heart into your toes with a foreboding sense of helplessness and then soaring up and away with a wild kind of exaltation.

I saw you toss the kites on high

And blow the birds about the sky;

And all around I heard you pass,

Like ladies' skirts across the grass--

O wind, a-blowing all day long,

O wind, that sings so loud a song!

I saw the different things you did,

But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all--
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!

O you that are so strong and cold,
O blower, are you young or old?
Are you a beast of field and tree,
Or just a stronger child than me?
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!

~Robert Lewis Stevenson

As a child, I never understood the questions at the end of the poem, but I recognized the unspoken mystery of the wind. The wind is one of the first things to teach us our own smallness. We can neither control it, nor ever completely understand it. After all, the weather man may predict it, and the scientist delineate in certain terms how it works, but why it blows…this is beyond the comprehension of human thought, and even little children unconsciously know it. I am reminded in it of the breath of God; that presence that fills the soul with wonderful, terrible fear, boundless awe and ceaseless joy.

I walked my garden in the heat of the day,

And buried my feet in the sun-baked clay;

And smelt the grass ripen, kissed of the sun,

That roams his dominion till day is done.

The wind brushed my arm on his way by

And whispered the strangest of lullabies.

Wild, strong and sweet his song still rings,

In my ears, of the plenty that summer brings.

Wind’s words, though I hearken, he cannot form,

Be his breath a breeze or high summer storm;

Yet perforce plays his melody at the command

Of thundering Word and prevailing Hand.

The earth bears its fruit and sky yields rain

And grass in the fields dies and ripens again.

How much more shall I than the mindless soil

Yield to His glory my heart, will and toil?

~EKL

This summer day is hot and languishing in the sun, the machines mixing bread grind away, and the rich strains of the Cleveland Quartet weave tales of the American countryside through the haunting melodies and harmonies of Dvorak’s 12th and 14th String Quartets. Everybody else is harvesting!

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Anyone who reads Gene Stratton Porter will recognize these… A dear friend, who read Gene Stratton Porter to her children, sent these to us. They are prolific, just like the story reads. And they taste like grapes.