The Hills of Hingham

by Dallas Lore Sharp

This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail from the melon fields of Jersey. Even there a watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, who, walking through a field of the radiant orbs (always buy an elongated ellipsoid for a real melon), hears them singing as they shine—even to the Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's first melon is of something out of Eden before the fall. But here in Massachusetts, Ah, the cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I fight, the blight I fight, the striped bugs I fight, the will-to-die in the very vines themselves I fight, until at last (once it was the 7th of August!) the heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with ripeness, and ready to split at the sight of a knife, answering to the thump with a far-off, muffled thud,—the family, I say, when that melon is brought in crisp and cool from the dewy field, is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into the doxology that morning deeper far than is usual for the mere manna and quail gathered daily at the grocer's.

We have been (once) to the circus, but that day is not in red. That is everybody's day, while the red-letter days on our calendar—Storm-Door-and-Double-Window Day, for instance; or the day close to Christmas when we begin, "Marley was dead, to begin with"; or the Day of the First Snow—these days are peculiarly, privately our own, and these are red.

XIV

THE FIELDS OF FODDER

It is doubtless due to early associations, to the large part played by cornfields in my boyhood, that I cannot come upon one now in these New England farms without a touch of homesickness. It was always the autumn more than the spring that appealed to me as a child; and there was something connected with the husking and the shocking of the corn that took deeper hold upon my imagination than any other single event of the farm year, a kind of festive joy, something solemnly beautiful and significant, that to this day makes a field of corn in the shock not so much the substance of earth's bounty as the symbol of earth's life, or rather of life—here on the earth as one could wish it to be—lived to the end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered and set in order over a broad field.

Perhaps I have added touches to this picture since the days when I was a boy, but so far back as when I used to hunt out the deeply fluted cornstalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I played—the notes of the wind coming over the field of corn-butts and stirring the loose blades as it moved among the silent shocks. I have more than a memory of mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks cut and shocked to shed the winter rain: that, and more, as of the sober end of something, the fulfillment of some solemn compact between us—between me and the fields and skies.

Is this too much for a boy to feel? Not if he is father to the man! I have heard my own small boys, with grave faces, announce that this is the 21st of June, the longest day of the year—as if the shadows were already lengthening, even across their morning way.

If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, it would come a four-o'clock, or a yellow evening primrose, for only the long afternoon shadows or falling twilight would waken and spread my petals. No, I would return an aster or a witch-hazel bush, opening after the corn is cut, the crops gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come sighing to the ground.