The Hills of Hingham

by Dallas Lore Sharp

or of automobiles. I must plough. It is the April wind that wakes the call—

"Zephirus eek, with his sweetë breeth"--

and many hearing it long to "goon on pilgrimages," or to the Maine woods to fish, or, waiting until the 19th, to leave Boston by boat and go up and down the shore to see how fared their summer cottages during the winter storms; some even imagine they have malaria and long for bitters—as many men as many minds when

"The time of the singing of birds is come
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

But as for me it is neither bitters, nor cottages, nor trout, nor

"ferne halwes couth in sondry landës"

that I long for: but simply for the soil, for the warming, stirring earth, for my mother. It is back to her breast I would go, back to the wide sweet fields, to the slow-moving team and the lines about my shoulder, to the even furrow rolling from the mould-board, to the taste of the soil, the sight of the sky, the sound of the robins and bluebirds and blackbirds, and the ringing notes of Highhole over the sunny fields.

I hold the plough as my only hold upon the earth, and as I follow through the fresh and fragrant furrow I am planted with every footstep, growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of the spring. I can catch the blackbirds ploughing, I can turn under with my furrow the laughter of the flowers, the very joy of the skies. But if I so much as turn in my tracks, the blackbirds scatter; if I shout, Highhole is silent; if I chase the breeze, it runs away; I might climb into the humming maples, might fill my hands with arbutus and bloodroot, might run and laugh aloud with the light; as if with feet I could overtake it, could catch it in my hands, and in my heart could hold it all—this living earth, shining sky, flowers, buds, voices, colors, odors—this spring!

But I can plough—while the blackbirds come close behind me in the furrow; and I can be the spring.

I could plough, I mean, when I had a plough. But I sold it for five dollars and bought a second-hand automobile for fifteen hundred—as everybody else has. So now I do as everybody else does,—borrow my neighbor's plough, or still worse, get my neighbor to do my ploughing, being still blessed with a neighbor so steadfast and simple as to possess a plough. But I must plough or my children's children will never live to have children,—they will have motor cars instead. The man who pulls down his barns and builds a garage is not planning for posterity. But perhaps it does not matter; for while we are purring cityward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns are following the plough round and round our ancestral fields, planting children in the furrows, so that there shall be some one here when we have motored off to possess the land.