I had begun with the beans, fearing an early frost, and remembering the
many summer dawns I had preciously invested in keeping the rows clean.
They hung in green multiplicity, in spite of the choking weeds that had
reared their heads high, unmolested by Coretta’s hoe. In fact, there
was a disconcerting abundance all about me. Having set out to be an
example of thrift, opportunity hung from every bush.
In this hand-to-hand engagement, I lost sight of general aims and
purposes. The fourteen points were laid by for later digestion. My
New York daily, ordered for filing through a momentous period, served
excellently for wrapping winter stores. I did not quite cease to
look at the labor horizon for epochal phenomena; but one day, after
talking with a farmer on the relative value of two varieties of sweet
potatoes, the Texas White and Early Beauty, I found this pencilled
among my farm-notes: “The Bisbee deportation is mealy for fall use,
but the Soviets are the best winter keepers.” Then I began to have
misgivings; but I crushed the seditious rumbling and kept on the path
indicated by the Department.
Serena returned, but went at once, as I had known she must, to the
fodder-pulling, and I had only an occasional friendly hand lent me for
help. I had moved my typewriter into the kitchen, thinking that odd
moments might go to the making of a masterpiece; but if genius gave a
surviving flutter, its tremolo was drowned by the drums and tabors of
conservation pomp. To Nature’s tender surprises I became callous; and
for her beauty that challenged obviously, I could say with Coretta that
I had no heart.
Coretta, who knew of old that I rather liked sunsets, coming one day to
borrow my last machine-needle, called my attention to an aggressively
colored sky by saying it was like a pile of “greenlins an’ ’maters.”
(Greenlands and tomatoes--yes.) I assented so readily that Coretta
flushed with the success of her venture in poetics.
When she was gone, I reflectively picked a letter from my batch of
half-read mail. It began: “Your last filled me with a veritable
nostalgia for your mountain. The odor of ripened grains and fruits and
new-cut wood overcomes me whenever I think of it. I see great white
clouds rearing their domes against a deep, blue sky; and at my feet
gentians star my way to you.”
I dropped the letter. Where was Autumn? How had I lost her? Like a
spear-thrust the question kept recurring until the next day, when Aunt
Janey Stiles came.