1940s Archive

Coast Calendar

Originally Published July 1947

Comes in high thunderheads. Leo is the sign, and he growls through the night; the panes light up from the quick glare of his eyes. Grandpa sleeps the thin sleep of an old man and mutters to himself about old haying days long ago. Haying is in the air. The smell of the red clover is heavy on the day after the shower. The lights on the daisies are going out.

The woodchuck brings his whole brood and lets them worship him for his good providing and sit munching in what he claims is his own patch of peas. But the house also has a mess of green peas' for the Fourth. The braided red strings of the firecrackers pop, the Roman candles hiss and cough out stars, and the small boy goes to bed with one good finger left on his right hand and crowded to the gunwales with tender peas and Kennebec salmon. Grandma dreams of red roses and knows the first baby down at the cottage on the cove will be a girl and very good-looking.

The feast of the month is wild strawberry cream. Wild strawberries hang the hayfields with dimpled rubies. It is now or never, before the haying. The girls stain their fingers with the berries, the small boy smells them out, going on all fours through sweet grass and buttercups with his buttercup-colored dog beside him. He gets more in his belly than he gets in his pail. Baskets of strawberries come home. Mother hulls by the hour, and the girls all help; but the boy is making pea-pod canoes and cannot find the time, though he snatches some of the biggest berries from the dish. There is a ten-quart mountain of the berries at last. Mother gets her wooden pestle and crushes the berries into a red mash, grinding up even the seeds, for the deepest flavor is in those. She puts in ten quarts of sugar. She lifts the thick cream off her milk pans like folds of yellow velver and stirs it all in the berries. She shoos the boy off and puts the dish down-cellar. Next day, the wild strawberries are the dinner, in a ten-quart earthen dish, buttressed with cream-o'-tartar biscuits. The boy eats a quart of paradise.

Now the nights are millions of drifting sparks of fireflies, and the whip-poorwill cries till he is a burden to bear. Wild briar roses set the world afire. The bees fill two golden tenement houses out of the white clover in the bay meadow. The thunder showers stand up white and lean over, growing like flowers as they come, the lightning plays on their petals, and the thunder comes long after the light. The small boy still half believes that thunder is big hogsheads being rolled down behind the sky, and when the rain comes, the staves in the hogsheads have burst and water gushes out. The sun goes out, it turns dark, it pours; but the sun comes out low, hailstones lie among the rose petals, and a rainbow spans the sea from one island to the other.

They jump to the haying now, while the day is still deep in morning dew. Grandpa trims with his scythe by the house, the horses lean ahead hard, and the tall grasses fall parallel before the teeth of the clicking machine. Father sits on air, on nothing, beside his cutter bar, he shouts to his dark-sweating team. The dog noses out mice without hair or eyes, and the boy nurses them in the heat of his hand. The boats and the traps lie idle, for hay is making in the sun and more thunder in the air. The windrows run over the hilly world. Each wind is sweet with them. The old man shows the young boy how to cock hay, combing the top straw into a roof; and the new wife learns how to make a custard pie from the old. The hands, smelling of hay, have shad for their dinner under the trees, and they joke about the many bones' making it hard for them to pull the shirts off their backs at night. Loads of hay roll into the dark barn, with no wheels showing. The boy rides on a sweet peak of the Andes into the barn gloom. He treads the hay into a golden dusk and sneezes for the chaff. The big boy is lost in a new man pitching off the rack. The cows break into the kidney beans, but the yellow dog disperses them. Greenhead flies bring blood on the horses, the red spurts out where they have bitten. Men sweat, bare as Indians to the waist.

In winter there is room for rhyme, But it's short stories in haying time.

Blueberries are bluing the pasture ledges. The girls go in deep sunbonnets after them, but the young boy wears a rhubarb leaf on his hair. The house smells of pies. Now a small boy picks potato bugs in the high great heat at five cents a quart, but there is cool lemonade at the row's end. The boy has almost forgotten what the molasses-haired girl looks like now, so long has it been since he's seen her. It is a fight to keep down the ragweed and pigweed in the garden. The hayers and hoers take a day off to go on the ocean, for the pollacks are schooling. The small boy hooks a snowy fish the size of himself, they gaff it in, and the red streams from its sides and stains the bilge water. Wild raspberries come in the cut-down where the stovewood of two winters back came from. Mother lines the cellar with jams and preserves.

The little dog pants with his tongue a good way out, but he gets up enough energy to run afoul of a raccoon and gets his ears bitten for his pains. The boy spends half of each day in the ocean, high-water time, learning to float on his back. His overalls are all that stand between him and the world when he is out of the water, and they have breathing holes at their seat. The last load of hay goes in, with a cluster of wild roses the farmer has put there upon it, as his father and his father's father did before him. Lobsters again are the harvest, once hay is in, though some of them are beginning to shed their shells.

It is the hay month, the fragrant month, month of the berries and sweat.

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