IX
The Country Road
On a June day, years ago, I was walking along our country road. At the top of a steep little hill I paused to rest and let my eyes luxuriate in the billowing greens and tender blues of the valley below. While I stood there my neighbor came slowly up from the garden, her apron over her head, a basket of green peas on her arm.
"What a view you have up here on your hill!" I said.
She drew back her apron and turned to look off. "Yes," she said indulgently; "ye-e-s." Then her face brightened and she turned to me with real animation: "But it's better in winter when the leaves is off, 'n' you c'n see the passin' on the lower road."
Fresh from the city as I was, with all its prejudices and intolerance upon me, I was partly amused, partly irritated, by her answer. So all this glory of greenness, all this wonder of the June woodland, was merely tolerated, while the baffled observer waited for the leaves to be "off"! And all for the sake of seeing—what? A few lumber wagons, forsooth, loaded with ties for the railway, a few cows driven along morning and evening, a few children trudging to and from school, the postman's buggy on its daily rounds, twice a week the meat cart, once a week the grocery wagon, once a month the "tea-man," and now and then a neighbor's team on its way to the feed-store or the blacksmith's shop down at "the Corners."
For this, then,—not for the beauty of the winter landscape, but for this poor procession of wayfarers, my neighbors waited with impatience. If I could, I would have snatched up their view bodily and carried it off with me, back to my own farm for my own particular delectation. It should never again have shoved itself in their way.
But since that time I have lived longer in the country. If I have not made it my home for all twelve months, I have dwelt in it from early April to mid-December, and now, when I think of my neighbor's remark, it is with growing comprehension. I realize that I, in my patronizing one-sidedness, was quite wrong.
City folk go to the country, as they say, to "get away"—justifiable enough, perhaps, or perhaps not. They seek spots remote from the centres; they choose deserted districts, untraveled roads; they criticize their ancestors unmercifully for their custom of building houses close to the road and keeping the front dooryard clear of shrubbery. But they who built those homes which are our summer refuge did not want to get away; they wanted to get together. The country was not their respite, it was their life, and the road was to them the emblem of race solidarity—nay, more than the emblem, it was the means to it. This is still the case with the country people, and as I live among them I am coming to a realization of the meaning of the Road.