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NINETEENTH WEEK
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.
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