The Hills of Hingham

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, the dead-levelness, of life largely a matter of individual vision, "as I see it"?

Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typified in my neighbor! how it is epitomized, too, and really explained in his "beans are beans"! He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. Life is pretty much all beans. If "beans are beans," why, how much more is life?

He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and there the sharing stops, and consequently there the returns stop. He gives to the soil and the soil gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What if he should give to the skies as well?—to the wild life that dwells with him on his land?—to the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook?—to the trees that cover his pasture slopes? Would they, like the soil, give anything back?

Off against the sky to the south a succession of his rounded slopes shoulder their way from the woods out to where the road and the brook wind through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too scant and gravelly; but they are lovely in their gentle forms, and still lovelier in their clumps of mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark and sharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and diffuse, and soft, and gleaming white against the hillside's green. I cannot help seeing them from my windows, cannot help lingering over them—could not, rather; for recently my neighbor (and there never was a better neighbor) sent a man over those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into cords of snowy firewood.

It was done. I could not help it, but in my grief I went over and spoke to him about it. He was sorry, and explained the case by saying,—

"Well, if there's one kind of tree I hate more than another, it's a gray birch."

We certainly need a rural uplift. We need an urban uplift, too, no doubt, for I suppose "beans are beans" in Boston, just as they are here in Hingham. But it does seem the more astonishing that in the country, where the very environment is poetry, where companionship with living things is constant, where even the labor of one's hands is coöperation with the divine forces of nature—the more astonishing, I say, that under these conditions life should so often be but bare existence, mere beans.

There are many causes for this, one of them being an unwillingness to share largely with the whole of nature. "I 'll go halves with the soil," said my neighbor; but he did not sign a lease to run his farm on shares with the "varmints," the fox, which stole his fine rooster, on this particular occasion.

But such a contract is absolutely necessary if one is to get out of farm life—out of any life—its flowers and fragrance, as well as its pods and beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must acknowledge to one's self, that the flower and fragrance are needed in life, are as useful as pods and beans. A row of sweet peas is as necessary on the farm as a patch of the best wrinkled variety in the garden.

But to come back to the fox.