The Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Words abide, but new phrases enter the tongue and old phrases exit, reflecting the way the social landscape alters. If, for example, at an old-fashioned family supper, you leaned across the tablecloth to take the yams from under your sister’s nose, you were told you had a “boardinghouse reach.” It was code for saying, “You’re behaving selfishly, like someone who doesn’t live in a nice home but has to rent a lonely room and eat with strangers.” In short, you got indicted for bad manners, low-class affinities, and antisocial leanings.

  You don’t hear the phrase much anymore. It evoked a time in the West when laboring men drifted like sand, or a calm dormered establishment with apron-hem rules of behavior against which the strong young men who boarded there were constantly, if coltishly, kicking. These incarnations of the rooming life have disappeared, so we’re dropping the expression. When a phrase becomes archaic, as “boardinghouse reach” almost has, an echo from the past vanishes, like coal smoke in an age of gas heat.

  Such phrases were only a wrinkle in time, I know, but I miss hearing them anyway. Sometimes I wish I owned a weekend cottage in the country of the old-time tongue—a little cabin near my grandma’s lexicon. You could stop by for a touch of Depression wisdom and talk some farm talk. You could stay the whole summer after too much TV You could come back replenished by speech that summoned the deep past the way the frost heaves stones to the surface of the earth.

  Some people believe that the power of the old-time tongue arose from the antique simplicity of living close to the land. Its homey metaphors seemed to spring, like corn, straight up from the ground. Having become a nation of city dwellers and suburbanites, we’re tempted to believe that somehow speech is losing its elemental force, that ours is a febrile dialect with twelve synonyms for “rapid transmission of data” and none for “spring thaw.” Now and then the grace or wit of a dying phrase strikes home and we remember it. We compare it sadly with our own thoughtless, habitual manner of talking, and the apparent smallness of the modern spirit seems all the more lamentable.

  But the power of common speech doesn’t grow from the soil or from a simple life or from any other virtue rooted in the past. It stems only from the irrepressible human urge to talk. To find the casual poetry of the past, all you need to do is listen closely to the present. Any day, anywhere, people will say anything. And though I know that all of this is true, I’d like to go back to the past for a time in any case. Not to meet Mr. Abraham Lincoln or to interview the Buddha. I’d like to go to a small Congregational church in Iowa on a Saturday afternoon in May. Outside, my grandfather is mowing the lawn. Inside, my grandmother is practicing the Sunday organ, and my mom is sitting in the front pew with her children, singing to herself the words of the hymn my grandmother, whose name was Nellie, plays. The oldest child pretends to be coloring, but he’s really waiting until the mowing and the music stop and his mother and grandparents start to talk together among themselves. He can hardly wait to hear what they’ll say.

  For the last few evenings it’s been almost impossible to come inside before dark. The shadows deepen and converge, the breeze shuffles the leaves in the sugar maples, and an unappraisable sweetness slips down from the woods—all of it with such careful modulation, the entrance of one player after another, that to call it artful sounds like dispraise. I sit and watch from civil twilight until astronomical twilight, from the time the bats first fly, cutting across the bay of light between the trees that line the pasture, until the bats can be seen only when they eclipse the stars.

  But no matter how perfect the night is, I always hear a voice in my head saying, “Come inside.” I’m not the only one who hears it. I drive along the farm roads, and I can see that everyone else is listening for it too. The dairy cows, freed from their stanchions, drift into udder-deep pastures where they’ll spend the night. But the farmers have measured the day out in chores, which are nearly always finished under the glare of a yardlight, whose growing intensity is itself a reminder to go inside. A softball game at a rural school is only a way of postponing the dispersal that will come before long, when the last car door thumps shut in the night and the last driver follows his headlights to the highway.

  In small towns the voice saying “Come inside” is painfully insistent. It’s written into the architecture, the landscaping, the principled neatness of the walks leading to each and every house. The azaleas bloom with undimmed ferocity even in twilight, and the porches are carpeted in plastic turf and set with plastic lawn chairs. In fading light, unoccupied, they seem to point to the darkness behind the screen door, a darkness broken only by the flickering of a television in another room. There’s nearly always a cemetery where the houses end. The streetlamps never light up that part of town. There the good medieval word “curfew” comes to mind, marking the time at night when hearth fires were covered and darkness became absolute.

  But on nights as cool and quiet as these have been, why come inside at all? The temptation is to lie out all night listening to the horses, who stand together, head to tail, in their favorite corner of the pasture. “Rigor now is gone to bed,” says the spirit Comus in John Milton’s masque, “And Advice with scrupulous head, / Strict Age, and sour Severity, / With their grave saws in slumber lie.” Who would choose to join such company? But if you’re a mortal reader of Milton, and if you stay outside late enough, you realize that Comus is also a poem about the pleasure of coming inside, about fleeing the entanglement of the night, whose otherness feels especially strong the instant you turn for home.

  On April 28, the postmistress called. A package had come for me from Claxton, Georgia—four pounds of bees in a wooden crate—and she was keeping it in the bathroom. Late that afternoon, at home, I sprayed the screen sides of the crate with sugar water to quiet the buzzing. I took a nearly empty can of sugar syrup out of the crate and a small cage just large enough to hold the queen bee and a few attendants. I poked a hole in the candy plug blocking the entrance to the queen cage and set the cage in a wooden box called a deep super, the base of a new hive. Then I shook as many bees onto the hive as I could. A few puffs of smoke drove them down into the super. I set a wooden feeder on top, filled it with sugar water, and replaced the cover.

  Three weeks have passed since then. The shadbush has bloomed and so have the elderberry and the peaches and the crab apple. The leaves on the trees have nearly all emerged, except for the honey locust, which is always late. I’m late too, still digging garden beds in a patch of soil near the new hive, which sits on a raised platform beside the hive I started last year. Several times a day I take a seat nearby and watch the bees. Workers come steadily, profusely, to the old hive, their legs clubbed with pollen. That hive contains drawn comb—sheets of hexagonal wax cells the bees built last summer—ready now to be filled with eggs, pollen, nectar, and honey.

  But when the new bees settled into their hive in late April, all they found was ten framed sheets of plastic, each lightly embossed with a honeycomb pattern. The workers had to release their foreign queen from her cage by eating through the candy plug, a delay that would give them time to adopt her. Some workers began building honeycomb for a bee nursery and larder. Others made foraging flights and repeated trips through the hive to the feeder above them. Bees from the new hive seemed at first to come and go at a different rate than ones from the old hive, and their legs carried less pollen. I wondered every day how they were doing, but it was better to leave them alone.

  One warm afternoon this past week, I opened the new hive. A little smoke from the smoker, and the bees scurried down into the frames. I removed the queen cage. It was empty. From the middle of the hive, I lifted a frame covered with fresh comb and in the uncapped cells saw eggs and coiled larvae. The queen was free and laying steadily. Many of the brood cells, where pupae awaited their final transformation into workers, had been capped, turning the wax a soft, rich yellow. In the corners, comb was filled with honey, capped in pure white. There were four such frames, and wax cells were already being raised across
the face of a fifth.

  The abruptness of spring, its riotous biological opportunism, is always surprising. One day there’s bare earth, and the next day the asparagus is four feet tall and ferning out. But there’s no surprise quite like that of new comb, new brood, in a new hive, so suddenly there where it wasn’t before. Every form replicates itself in this season—every leaf coming true to ancient pattern—but that replication is nowhere as pure as it is in a hive. The comb is perfect geometry, a field of hexagons raised with unimaginable cunning, and the hive is perfect prosperity. The scent of new beeswax drifts downwind to where I sit. Bees plummet onto the entrance board, overweighted with pollen, overburdened with spring.

  From solstice till equinox, summer lasts only ninety-one days and six hours, a little longer if you count from Memorial Day till Labor Day. It seems like so much time. But the closer you get, the smaller summer looks, unlike winter, which looks longer and longer the nearer it comes. From a distance—from April, say—summer looks as capacious as hope. This will be the season we lose weight, eat well, work out, raise a garden, learn to kayak, read Proust, paint the house, drive to Glacier, and so on and so on and so on. This will be the season in which time stretches before us like the recesses of space itself, the season in which leisure swells like a slow tomato, until it’s round and red and ripe.

  By the time Memorial Day comes and goes, flashing across the year like a meteor in the night sky, a certain realism creeps in. The universe expands, but not the calendar. Only August remains infinite. June and part of July are already booked solid, and the trouble with that is that once an event is penciled in it’s already over. The festival tickets you bought in April, when summer still had all its weekends, now haunt you with regret. The search for uncommitted time grows more and more desperate. The peonies are nearly past, and before long the goldenrod will bloom. The field-crickets are already ticking away the seconds of full summer.

  It’s enough to make a person crazy, that dream of a summer where dawn is as cool as the ocean and the time in which you happen to live, the day and hour itself, overlaps with all of the rest of time. Everyone reaches for fullness in summer, but the fullness that most of us know best belongs to the memory of childhood. What was it that made summer days so long back then and made the future seem so distant? What was the thing we knew or didn’t know?

  One of the rules of perspective, which nearly everyone understands intuitively, is that distant objects only appear to be smaller than nearby objects. But imagine a world in which distant objects appear younger than nearby objects, and younger not on the narrow time scale of years or generations, but on an evolutionary time scale. In a world like that you would look at a horse on the distant horizon and see its distant ancestor, running rapidly away from you. The same horse, if it looked your way, would see only the rapidly receding ancestral human in you. This would be a hard world in which to measure time or distance.

  Yet that’s the universe. Distant galaxies appear younger and less evolved than nearer galaxies because we look at them not only across distance, but also across time. Distant galaxies also appear to be moving more rapidly away from us than nearer ones because, in essence, they still preserve the momentum with which the earlier universe—as young as the light from those remote galaxies—was expanding. Looking out into space, we look into the past, and yet the farther we look, the younger the objects we see. Viewed in this light, “here and now” is the oldest, or rather the least young, place in the universe.

  So how old is the universe? A team of scientists led by an astronomer from the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, has completed a survey of 800 stars called Cepheid Variables, and it indicates that the universe is probably between 12 billion and 13.5 billion years old. These are comforting numbers, if only because they mean that the universe is not younger than the stars within it, a result that earlier estimates had absurdly suggested. But for most of us, these are still problematic numbers. Something about counting in billions makes us dizzy. Previous estimates of the universe’s age ranged from 10 billion to 20 billion years. For some reason, this doesn’t sound like a very broad range of numbers, though a universe that’s 20 billion years old is obviously twice as old as one that’s merely 10 billion years old.

  Around A.D. 300, Eusebius concluded that the universe was created 5,198 years before the Incarnation of Christ. Even if the universe were only 12 billion years old, it would be 2,182,612 times older than Eusebius thought it was. Somehow that doesn’t convey the immensity it should. Neither does the fact that, given these new numbers, the universe is only a little more than three times as old as life on Earth. The difficulty doesn’t lie in the age of the universe. It lies in our tendency to imagine all those billions as a single sum and not as the slow progression of one year after another and another and another from the Big Bang till now.

  The dry resonance at night—the ticking of insects—is not as authoritative as it will be in another month. Nor has the city begun to seep with heat, to melt at the crosswalks. Memorial Day is the porch before the house of summer, and spring is still latent here, still discernible in what blooms and hasn’t bloomed, in the constellations that haven’t yet risen to midsummer’s height. If summer is the flat light on a dead-calm sea, the haze that enshrouds the horizon after a week without rain, then this is a time when wind and water are still freshening, still disturbed by echoes from a more vehement season.

  It’s always striking how holidays that begin as legislative events embed themselves in our sense of the year’s natural order. Memorial Day began as a Grand Army proclamation in 1868 to coordinate the decoration of the graves of the Union dead, and it was adopted as an official holiday in 1873 by New York State, the first state to do so. Over time, the holiday, and the decorating of graves with flowers, has embraced the dead from all of America’s wars, even as the day itself has lost its commemorative quality for many Americans.

  But to anyone who has ever marched in an old-fashioned, small-town Memorial Day parade, there’s no forgetting the peculiar stir of feelings that this day brings. It’s a morning parade, and it makes its way to a cemetery on the edge of town, a place where cypress grows against the backdrop of cleanshaven lawn and fields of new-sprung corn. An odd moment occurs when the parade arrives at the cemetery. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and the members of the high school marching band look on while their elders, plainly moved though the day is bright and it’s not yet noon, honor men—mostly men—who barely figure in the minds of the young people trying to stand at attention. It’s always this way, the old honoring those who died young while the young wait impatiently nearby, disbelieving in death.

  To enter summer with an act of solemnity, however slight, however quickly dispelled by the long afternoon that follows the parade, has a certain emotional fitness. It’s almost an apology for the thoughtless vitality of this season, a time when the naked exuberance of nature bears the living away into June and July and forgetfulness. Our job now is to live out all those summers that were lost to the men and women who died in wars past, as well as our own summers too. It’s no burden to do so.

  June

  Suddenly the field grasses are knee-high, and in the woods the ferns have completely uncoiled. The first hay has already been cut. A light afternoon breeze now carries the tentative bleating of crickets and the hush of leaves in the trees, sounds that seem to advance the season a month or two. Recently the sun shone for five straight days—a feat virtually unexampled in the past calendar year—and high temperatures reached the seventies. By the third day of steady sun, a cautious delirium had spread among the damp-stained residents of the valley towns nearby. Many persons—especially the old male gossips in village post offices—thought the sunshine was nothing but a sucker play. The root of the New England character is incredulity, a state of chronic, weather-induced heartbreak, and this has been the kind of slow, cold spring in which that character was formed.

  For most of May it seemed as though the woods would nev
er give up their bud-red hue or the underlying russet tint of maple flowers. Until a few days ago I could sit on top of a nearby mountain and see on the forest floor the white trunks of birches felled by one of this season’s windstorms. The birches looked like the desiccated ribs of some enormous beast whose flesh had melted away in the rain. The thermals rising from the east and west sides of the mountain converged along the ridge, trapping a host of flying insects in turbulence. Swallows pillaged the insect cloud, chattering and diving in raucous motion, the rush of air over their wings almost audible. Not far off, a squadron of vultures slid quietly along the sky, bare heads cocking back and forth, eyes blinking imperturbably. From time to time, a vulture would flap its wings deeply—just once—to correct some imperfection in its otherwise perfect flight.

  Now the canopy of leaves has nearly filled in, and when a vulture slips below the horizon, it seems to disappear into the deepening shade that defines the contours of the trees on distant hills. But spring hasn’t quite passed into summer yet. In the late afternoon the sun spills through broken clouds onto the expanse of woods that lies west of here, a landscape that rolls outward to the indistinct Catskills. For a moment, caught in that shifting light, the woods shine as bright as a field of mustard.

  Two kinds of mites have been ravaging bee populations in the United States for the past decade, and my bees are not immune. When you open a healthy hive in midsummer, you can practically feel the frames of honey and brood cells quivering as you lift them, resonating with the pulse of wingbeats and respiration from clustering bees. The enterprise is utterly alive, the collective intact. I took that vitality more for granted than I should have. The bee colonies collapsed, the snows came, and all three hives died. In one of them this spring I found the nest of a mouse that had eaten its way into the sweet darkness and wintered over, unstung. So I began again, but in a different place, and with a renewed commitment to raise bees and let the honey take care of itself. There are two hives now, and on warm days the entrances are choked with bees.