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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

The Rural Life


Frost Time

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: October 14, 2006

For the most part our animals don’t have many 
secrets from us. The reverse is probably true 
too, except for the one big secret we keep from 
the pigs. The horses and poultry are always in 
sight, and together we all belong to something 
that is larger than any one of us ­ the daily routine of this small farm.

Morning and evening I can always feel the animals 
leaning toward what they know comes next ­ a walk 
down to the barn, hay and grain, layer mash, egg 
gathering and the filling of water tanks. The 
livestock clock in and out as surely as I do.

But sometimes I take the animals by surprise, and 
I get to witness how deeply they reside here. It 
happened the other day. We awoke to the first 
frost of autumn, a clear bright morning that had 
not fully lost its chill by noon when I walked 
down to get the mail. In the big pasture the 
horses stood broadside to the sun. The ducks and 
geese lay sound asleep in the threadbare shade of 
a hickory that had hastened to lose its leaves. 
Some hens had sprawled in a dust bath, and there 
was a subcommittee meeting going on in the entrance to the chicken house.

Here I was, cutting my narrow vulpine arc to the 
mailbox and back, and there, all around me, life 
seemed to have stopped. We think of time as a 
cold transparent thing without substance. But 
here, in this midday pause, time seemed to be 
giving off as much warmth as the sun itself. The 
horses were basking in the heat of the sun. But 
they were also basking in what I can’t help 
calling their continuity, their presence in the 
long, floating, unscheduled, middle part of the 
day. Nothing about their manner suggested that 
this was a private moment. And yet I felt that I 
was looking into a private moment.

The reason is simple. Whenever my life intersects 
with theirs, it is all expectation, a concern for 
what comes next. But in the middle of the day, 
the animals drift away into a life all their own. 
I notice that they are able to follow me into all 
the haste and bustle of my life. But if I stepped 
into the pasture, to pause in the sun, the horses 
would wander over as if to ask, “What now?”

VERLYN KLINKENBORG

[This is in today's New York Times. I normally 
give the url as attribution but my computer has 
suddenly decided to not show urls and I can't figure out how to get them back.]