To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] Frosty Verlyn
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 09:36:09 -0500
The Rural Life
Frost Time
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: October 14, 2006
For the most part our animals dont 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 cant 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.]