For Jack and Will
I have seen and experienced much of what Robert Frost has so simply and yet meticulously portrayed in gentle tones through poetry that so beautifully captures life... especially life in New England... including my youth in the Green Mountains of Vermont. These experiences have become foreign to many in our fast paced world... but they encompass a life that I cling to despite leaving those country ways in the heart of the mountains forty years ago.
From 'Birches' by Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust-
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen...
I have my memories... the remembrance of warm summer afternoons climbing the side of the mountain in search of the cows that I should return them to the barn for the evening milking. I listened intently for the sound of their bells, for there were many paths and a couple hundred acres or more where they could be... and on some special days that were particularly pleasant with a gentle breeze, I would come past a certain large rock that was in a tiny clearing, warmed by the late afternoon sun... and I would lay upon that rock and fall asleep, surrounded by the sounds of nature... and for the future, it had instilled a love for trees and flowers and the garden and rocks as well, in a place where there was no forest and there were no mountains... but I would create my own... so that on a quiet fall day, I would experience that same sense of being at peace with myself and my God and that which grows in the earth...
'The Pasture' by Robert Frost
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may)
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
Every so often I would venture to the forested hills at the base of the mountains across the river that flowed through our valley. It was important when crossing to know where the shallows were... once through the river I would head north to the head of a stream at the point where it emptied into this Mad River, as was its name since in the spring during snow run-off and ice break up, it could be fierce... flowing over its banks and taking out whatever got in its way.
I would follow the stream which shortly passed through a flattened area that for all of me appeared as the most beautiful shaded parkland, as if some garden designer had a hand in its existence, and yet greater than any earthly designer could comprehend. I knew this area well as my father would awaken me at before first light on the first day of fishing each spring, that we would be able to go to this secret place to cast lines in pursuit of the brook trout that spawned in this stream. When I accompanied my father in the spring of the year, this was not an easy trek as the river was at that season unfordable. We would drive a distance south and over a bridge to access a dirt road which returned some distance high above the opposite side of the river. Shortly we would come to a gated pasture where my father was welcome to enter and there was an ancient farmstead inhabited by a certain Dickinson... I can barely see him in my mind's eye... to my young mind he seemed gruff and frightening... an old man who kept to himself and lived with a housekeeping woman who never spoke a word. From this point it would be what seemed to me a miles long trek to reach the head of the very stream that was so approachable in the fall when the waters were low in the river bed.
But now it was autumn and I approached the stream alone... I would follow it up the mountain, noting the touch of man through many generations. There were stone walls built by sheep farmers in the 1700's that still stood despite the passing of time. There were waterfalls off stone ledges with quiet deep pools at their base... and others were but cascades... it has been so long and I wonder if they were so grand, but to me in my youth they seemed so. Occasionally it would be necessary to roll under or climb over some length of rusty barbed wire fence... from a more recent time, but still very old. Eventually I would reach my goal... a patch of clearing and the remains of an old stone basement with rotted timbers falling in upon it. No one had lived in this remote mountain clearing for generations and it was all but lost among the spread of alders. I would sit here amongst the bramble of blackberries and try to imagine what life must have been like so very long ago... a livelihood now returned to the forest but still recognizable signs not yet totally saturated into the mountainside. And I would think... there would always be this link with the past... for the placement of the stones in the foundation was somewhat permanent, unless the movement of the frost in spring would jar them from their spot, or another generation would move them away from where they had grown accustomed to being in this the most recent chapter of their existence... but even to this place in time, few souls will ever come upon this remote place.
'The Ghost House' by Robert Frost
I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
| The woods come back to the mowing field; |
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart; |
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.
It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me—
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar. |
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.
From 'Mending Walls' by Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side.
A wall built with one's own hands... only in my later years did I come to understand the importance of such a venture in a person's life. Whether to apportion the spaces in one's life, or to support the roof over one's head, it is an important thing to build a wall... to go out and gather up the stones, to place them just correctly, and to sit back when the work is through... and think 'I built that wall' and it will stand longer than I... and maybe someday in the distant future a dreamer of dreams will wonder what it was like when that wall was built.
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Like an ancient homestead, my arbor brings me pleasure as it creates a sense of the passing of time through the dry rot in its cedar logs...
And this place that was grassy pasture surrounding a 150 year old squatter that had served long years as a cheese factory... despite its own history on an open prairie, now provides the needed facsimile to those years long ago when I lived in the hills and forests of my youth... we all can build a place of our own that provides a reminder of what we have held dear in our lives... even if others may not understand... our private traditions, if allowed to do so, can be a part of what makes us who we are. Some wish to forget the past... I believe history shapes the future.. it is good to remember what has been special in one's life... and to learn from that which was not so good... in these ways, we grow.
Take care, Larry
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