The Rural Life Read Online Free Page A

that those endless new streets and new houses almost always enshrine an idea of land use, of community, of living itself, that is already old and failing, an experiment that is tried and found wanting day after day.
    The use we make of one kind of land depends on the uses we make of all the other kinds. Denver and environs is the proof. If you turn the Rockies into a playground or, at best, an idealized wilderness, and if you reduce agricultural living to a vestige of an almost forgotten past, then you have successfully cleared the ground for paving the rest of the state clear to Kansas in one direction and to Wyoming in another. To speak from a rural conscience—to say, simply, that this is the wrong way to go about things, a way that’s fostered by a deep human venality, a willingness to be bribed into ignorance—is to speak from a place of silence where no one expects to hear wisdom anymore.

    J ust now at home a certain winter weariness sets in. Every morning and evening I can feel the sun pushing back the margins of night. It’s a dull soul who hasn’t checked sunrise or sunset against his watch several times by now, struck by how early the light comes and how late it begins to go. But that just makes a day of heavy overcast and freezing rain feel all the worse, more of an impairment than it would have been when the sodden year was still shrinking. The rain falls as it has all winter, over ice and snow, as if to make a none-too-subtle point about the climate in this part of New York State, a point that those of us who live here start to take seriously only about now.
    The rain falls on frozen ground, and the barnyard looks medieval, a vile compost tea in every puddle. At the bird feeders it looks as though we’re running a goldfinch feedlot. Sullen birds shoulder each other aside and seem to squabble more than finches ordinarily do, which is constantly. The other day a mob of robins appeared in the lower pasture on a southeastern slope where the ice cap had retreated. They moved like shore-birds across the frozen turf, staggering forward and falling back, not just that lone bird—the first robin, sign of spring—but a herd, as though there wouldn’t be enough assurance in the sight of only one.
    I filled the horses’ water tank the other morning, and as I did a pileated woodpecker cut across the hillside with a cry of demented hilarity. On dry, cold mornings, the woodpecker goes to work at early light, knocking a row of holes in a hollow tree trunk, waking the woods from hibernation, raising the sap in the sugar maples. The pileated woodpecker forecasts nothing, as far as I can tell. It lives here year round, and its plumage doesn’t seem to change, nor does its lunatic cry. Before long, another woodpecker will begin trying to drill through the metal roof of the barn the way it did last year. It will sound as though the world were an empty fifty-five-gallon drum with only the bird on the outside, hammering away. The racket puzzles even the crows in the ash trees.
    One day soon the rain will let up, and the frost will leave the ground as stealthily as it came. There will be yielding all around and a sudden insistent adhesion in the barnyard. The urge to clean away winter from the corners of the lawn, from the deep shade beneath the hemlocks, will become irresistible. But all of this hides somewhere on the next page of the calendar. The good news now lies deep within the beehive, where the workers, their dead cast aside into the melting snow, have set the queen laying eggs once again.

March

    I n the midnineties New England winters had an old-fashioned rigor about them—plenty of snow and temperatures cold enough to make life before central heating look improbable. This winter has lacked that elemental sternness. The bitter weather that stupefied the Plains states largely bypassed New England, which has experienced episodes of balminess. Once or twice the mercury has dipped below zero, and snow has fallen, but