XII
MY CAPE FARM
If I have thought of it at all, I have thought of myself as a sociable cuss. Not that I like sociables; I hate them, and that is probably why they have gone out of fashion. What to my mind defines sociability is the quality of enjoying and giving enjoyment to others, singly, in pairs, or in groups; and in present days sociability is generally put to the test either at dinners or at week-end parties, for these are the principal points of contact between friends.
Latterly, however, my social bent has been somewhat warped by the growing desire on the part of my friends to boast of their success as producers of food. Whether it be premature senility, the result of conservation, or merely the acquisition of wealth, which is being rapidly returned to its own through the purchase of land and the ingenuity of gardeners, it is a fact that at dinners of the cut-and-dried variety or a family gathering, or, more especially, over a week-end, my host invariably calls attention to the asparagus with a modest cough as prelude, or my hostess mentions the number of eggs the farmer brought in yesterday to be put down in water-glass. Sometimes it is not asparagus, but peas, or corn, or perhaps a chicken, or even a ham. This the host. His wife more generally dilates upon the milk products and the preserving end of the bill of fare; but, for whatever cause, the thing got a bit on my nerves, so that I found myself thinking of reasons for not visiting So-and-So or for not dining with the Thing-um-Bobs on Friday week, when I knew we hadn’t a thing on earth to do.
This frame of mind was, of course, all wrong. In the first place, these friends were as good and as loyal as they were ten years ago, when, if they had any garden at all, it consisted of a half-dozen radishes that no one could eat without summoning a physician within four hours. Furthermore, the aforesaid asparagus, with its accompaniments, was better than the ordinary variety which has decorated the entrance to the greengrocer’s establishment for the better part of a week. And lastly, as I had no garden myself, why not enjoy the best and be thankful?
Probably the reason was envy and the season spring, when, contrary to budding nature, one’s own physical being is not as blooming as it should be.
Be this as it may, the final result has probably made me more of a bore to my friends than they ever were to me, for to get even with them I conceived the happy idea of catering to their epicurean tastes from my own farm, which consisted of a scant two acres of shore line in that section of Cape Cod which is renowned for its scarcity of soil.
The idea came to me soon after we had moved down for the summer months, and my wife became so enthusiastic that it really became our hobby for the season. We had planned for a succession of week-ends, and many of these agricultural intimates were coming to us for return visits. We would feed them upon the fat of our land or in this case largely the fat of the sea.
It is interesting and instructive to learn just what varieties of food can be secured from the immediate vicinity of any place, and to me especially so of our Cape Cod.
During the entire summer I felt so personal an interest in our section of the country that my small son exclaimed one day that I talked as if I owned the entire Cape. I know I felt a proprietary interest in certain fishing grounds, the whereabouts of which I would not confess even on the rack. And it amuses me now to think of the circuitous routes I used in getting to certain berry patches and stretches where mushrooms grew overnight. In variety our dinners, or high teas (as we always called them), were infinite as compared with those of our asparagus associates.