The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Quhen ever scho list scho had aneuch to eit.

Enough to eat? Certainly; but is enough to eat all that a mouse wants? So far from being satisfied with mere meat was this particular mouse, that finding herself in the cellar in the midst of plenty, she at once began to carry my winter stores from where I had put them, and to make little heaps for herself in every dark cranny and corner of the cellar. A pint, or less, of “nuttis”—shagbarks—she tucked away in the toe of my hunting boot. The nuts had been left in a basket in the vegetable cellar; the boots stood out by the chimney in the furnace room, and there were double doors and a brick partition wall between. No matter. Here were the nuts she had not yet stored, and out yonder was the hole, smooth and deep and dark, to store them in. She found a way past the partition wall.

Every morning I shook those nuts out of my boot and sent them rattling over the cellar floor. Every night the mouse gathered them up and put them snugly back into the toe of the boot. She could not have carried more than one nut at a time,—up the tall boot-leg and down the oily, slippery inside. I should have liked to see her scurrying about the cellar, looking after her curiously difficult harvest. Apparently, they were new nuts to her every evening. Once or twice I came down to find them lying untouched. The mouse, perhaps, was away over night on other business. But the following night they were all gathered and nicely packed in the boot as before. And as before I sent them sixty ways among the barrels and boxes of the furnace room. But I did it once too often, for it dawned upon the mouse one night that these were the same old nuts that she had gathered now a dozen times; and that night they disappeared. Where? I wondered. Weeks passed, and I had entirely forgotten about the nuts, when I came upon them, the identical nuts of my boot, tiered carefully up in a corner of the deep, empty water-tank away off in the attic.

Store? The mouse had to store. She had to, not to feed her body,—there was plenty in the cellar for that,—but to satisfy her soul. A mouse’s soul, that something within a mouse which makes for more than meat, may not be a soul at all, but only a bundle of blind instincts. The human soul, that thing whose satisfaction is so often a box of chocolates and a silk petticoat, may be better and higher than the soul of a mouse, may be a different thing indeed; but originally it, too, had simple, healthful instincts; and among them, atrophied now, but not wholly gone, may still be found the desire for a life that is more than something to eat and something to put on.

To be sure, here on the farm, one may eat all of his potatoes, his corn, his beans and squashes before the long, lean winter comes to an end. But if squashes to eat were all, then he could buy squashes, bigger, fairer, fatter ones, and at less cost, no doubt, at the grocery store. He may need to eat the squash, but what he needs more, and cannot buy, is the raising of it, the harvesting of it, the fathering of it. He needs to watch it grow, to pick it, to heft it, and have his neighbor heft it; to go up occasionally to the attic and look at it. He almost hates to eat it.

A man may live in the city and buy a squash and eat it. That is all he can do with a boughten squash; for a squash that he cannot raise, he cannot store, nor take delight in outside of pie. And can a man live where his garden is a grocery? his storehouse a grocery? his bins, cribs, mows, and attics so many pasteboard boxes, bottles, and tin cans? Tinned squash in pie may taste like any squash pie; but it is no longer squash; and is a squash nothing if not pie? Oh, but he gets a lithograph squash upon the can to show him how the pulp looked as God made it. This is a sop to his higher sensibilities; it is a commercial reminder, too, that life even in the city should be more than pie,—it is also the commercial way of preserving the flavor of the canned squash, else he would not know whether he were eating squash or pumpkin or sweet potato. But then it makes little difference, all things taste the same in the city,—all taste of tin.

There is a need in the nature of man for many things,—for a wife, a home, children, friends, and a need for winter. The wild goose feels it, too, and no length of domesticating can tame the wild desire to fly when the frosts begin to fall; the woodchuck feels it; carry him to the tropics and still he will sleep as though the snows of New England lay deep in the mouth of his burrow. The partridge’s foot broadens at the approach of winter into a snowshoe; the ermine’s fur turns snow-white. Winter is in their bones; it is good for them; it is health, not disease—with snowshoes provided and snow-colored fur.

Nature supplies her own remedies. Winter brings its own cure,—snowshoes and snowy coats, short days and long nights, the narrowed round, the widened view, the open fire, leisure, quiet, and the companionship of your books, your children, your wife, your own strange soul—here on the farm.

Where else does it come, bringing all of this? Where else are conditions such that all weather is good weather? The weather a man needs? Here he is planted like his trees; his roots are in the soil; the changing seasons are his life. He feeds upon them; works with them; rests in them; yields to them, and finds in their cycle more than the sum of his physical needs.

A man lives quite without roots in a city, like some of the orchids, hung up in the air; or oftener, like the mistletoe, rooted, but drawing his life parasitically from some simpler, stronger, fresher life planted far below him in the soil. There he cannot touch the earth and feed upon life’s first sources. He knows little of any kind but bad weather. Summer is hot, winter is nasty, spring and autumn scarcely are at all, for they do not make him uncomfortable. The round year is four changes of clothes—and a tank-sprinkled, snow-choked, smoke-clouded, cobble-paved, wheel-wracked, street-scented, wire-lighted half-day, half-night something, that is neither spring, summer, autumn, nor winter.