The closing scenes are not necessarily funereal. A garden should be
got ready for winter as well as for summer. When one goes into
winter-quarters, he wants everything neat and trim. Expecting high
winds, we bring everything into close reef. Some men there are who never
shave (if they are so absurd as ever to shave), except when they go
abroad, and who do not take care to wear polished boots in the bosoms of
their families. I like a man who shaves (next to one who does n't shave)
to satisfy his own conscience, and not for display, and who dresses as
neatly at home as he does anywhere. Such a man will be likely to put his
garden in complete order before the snow comes, so that its last days
shall not present a scene of melancholy ruin and decay.
I confess that, after such an exhausting campaign, I felt a great
temptation to retire, and call it a drawn engagement. But better
counsels prevailed. I determined that the weeds should not sleep on the
field of battle. I routed them out, and leveled their works. I am master
of the situation. If I have made a desert, I at least have peace; but
it is not quite a desert. The strawberries, the raspberries, the celery,
the turnips, wave green above the clean earth, with no enemy in sight.
In these golden October days no work is more fascinating than this
getting ready for spring. The sun is no longer a burning enemy, but a
friend, illuminating all the open space, and warming the mellow soil.
And the pruning and clearing away of rubbish, and the fertilizing, go on
with something of the hilarity of a wake, rather than the despondency of
other funerals. When the wind begins to come out of the northwest of set
purpose, and to sweep the ground with low and searching fierceness, very
different from the roistering, jolly bluster of early fall, I have put
the strawberries under their coverlet of leaves, pruned the grape-vines
and laid them under the soil, tied up the tender plants, given the fruit
trees a good, solid meal about the roots; and so I turn away, writing
Resurgam on the gatepost. And Calvin, aware that the summer is past and
the harvest is ended, and that a mouse in the kitchen is worth two birds
gone south, scampers away to the house with his tail in the air.
And yet I am not perfectly at rest in my mind. I know that this is only
a truce until the parties recover their exhausted energies. All winter
long the forces of chemistry will be mustering under ground, repairing
the losses, calling up the reserves, getting new strength from my
surface-fertilizing bounty, and making ready for the spring campaign.
They will open it before I am ready: while the snow is scarcely melted,
and the ground is not passable, they will begin to move on my works; and
the fight will commence. Yet how deceitfully it will open to the music
of birds and the soft enchantment of the spring mornings! I shall even
be permitted to win a few skirmishes: the secret forces will even wait
for me to plant and sow, and show my full hand, before they come on in
heavy and determined assault. There are already signs of an internecine
fight with the devil-grass, which has intrenched itself in a
considerable portion of my garden-patch. It contests the ground inch by
inch; and digging it out is very much such labor as eating a piece of
choke-cherry pie with the stones all in. It is work, too, that I know
by experience I shall have to do alone. Every man must eradicate his own
devil-grass. The neighbors who have leisure to help you in grape-picking
time are all busy when devil-grass is most aggressive. My neighbors'
visits are well timed: it is only their hens which have seasons for
their own.
I am told that abundant and rank weeds are signs of a rich soil; but
I have noticed that a thin, poor soil grows little but weeds. I am
inclined to think that the substratum is the same, and that the only
choice in this world is what kind of weeds you will have. I am not much
attracted by the gaunt, flavorless mullein, and the wiry thistle of
upland country pastures, where the grass is always gray, as if the world
were already weary and sick of life. The awkward, uncouth wickedness of
remote country-places, where culture has died out after the first crop,
is about as disagreeable as the ranker and richer vice of city life,
forced by artificial heat and the juices of an overfed civilization.
There is no doubt that, on the whole, the rich soil is the best: the
fruit of it has body and flavor. To what affluence does a woman (to
take an instance, thank Heaven, which is common) grow, with favoring
circumstances, under the stimulus of the richest social and intellectual
influences! I am aware that there has been a good deal said in poetry
about the fringed gentian and the harebell of rocky districts and
waysides, and I know that it is possible for maidens to bloom in very
slight soil into a wild-wood grace and beauty; yet, the world through,
they lack that wealth of charms, that tropic affluence of both person
and mind, which higher and more stimulating culture brings,--the passion
as well as the soul glowing in the Cloth-of-Gold rose. Neither persons
nor plants are ever fully themselves until they are cultivated to
their highest. I, for one, have no fear that society will be too much
enriched. The only question is about keeping down the weeds; and I
have learned by experience, that we need new sorts of hoes, and more
disposition to use them.
Moral Deduction.--The difference between soil and society is evident. We
bury decay in the earth; we plant in it the perishing; we feed it with
offensive refuse: but nothing grows out of it that is not clean; it
gives us back life and beauty for our rubbish. Society returns us what
we give it.
Pretending to reflect upon these things, but in reality watching the
blue-jays, who are pecking at the purple berries of the woodbine on the
south gable, I approach the house. Polly is picking up chestnuts on the
sward, regardless of the high wind which rattles them about her head and
upon the glass roof of her winter-garden. The garden, I see, is filled
with thrifty plants, which will make it always summer there. The callas
about the fountain will be in flower by Christmas: the plant appears
to keep that holiday in her secret heart all summer. I close the outer
windows as we go along, and congratulate myself that we are ready for
winter. For the winter-garden I have no responsibility: Polly has entire
charge of it. I am only required to keep it heated, and not too hot
either; to smoke it often for the death of the bugs; to water it once
a day; to move this and that into the sun and out of the sun pretty
constantly: but she does all the work. We never relinquish that theory.
As we pass around the house, I discover a boy in the ravine filling a
bag with chestnuts and hickorynuts. They are not plenty this year; and
I suggest the propriety of leaving some for us. The boy is a little
slow to take the idea: but he has apparently found the picking poor, and
exhausted it; for, as he turns away down the glen, he hails me with,
“Mister, I say, can you tell me where I can find some walnuts?”
The coolness of this world grows upon me. It is time to go in and light
a wood-fire on the hearth.