The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg Read Free Book Online

all over the world. The agriculture Jefferies had in mind was a deep biological complexity, not
     quarter-sections of soybeans.
    I’m no farmer, and the land I live on is naturally better suited to growing a little of many crops than to growing a lot of
     one. The economic argument for raising vegetables and apples and a couple of pigs is small change anyway. But the garden waste
     and the windfall apples will go to the pigs, as will pasture grasses and hickory nuts and beech mast and some commercial grain.
     Meanwhile, the pigs will fertilize the pasture and grub out the underbrush at the edge of the woods. In late autumn I’ll haul
     them up the road to a local independent slaughterhouse, which has a smokehouse of its own. I don’t know what I will think
     when that happens, though nearly everyone tries to tell me how it will be.

    I t’s almost impossible to think about nature without thinking about time. In the country, time isn’t the fourth dimension,
     it’s the only dimension, and it tugs in an ancestral way that has nothing to do with clocks or calendars. Time in nature is
     both an axis and a cycle. But it’s also a jumble, a collision, especially in the way it works on human feelings. As Milton
     says of geese, humans are “intelligent of season,” and that’s a perplexing condition to be in.
    Last week, between New Lebanon and Petersburg, New York, Route 22 was an asphalt strip cut right through the natural year.
     On the highest hills, snow had fallen overnight, clinging to every branch. On the middle slopes, the trees that had begun
     to blossom looked like plumes of smoke, little different from the smoke that rose from burning leaf piles along the ditches.
     The Hoosic River had risen to near flooding. In the deepest stretches its waters were thoroughly soiled, but in the shallows
     they had turned a chalky aquamarine, the color of oxidized siding on a mobile home. In the cornfields, filled with last year’s
     stubble, the first speculative tire tracks had been laid by tractors, which had then turned home because of the damp. Some
     fields were still covered with an autumnal thatch, while others had sprung so green I almost longed to be put out to pasture.
    If the first iris spears and the purple tips of lilac buds still seemed tentative somehow, the birds did not. Robins bombed
     across the highway only a few feet above its surface. Cardinals took a higher, fluttering path. Turkeys hoping to cross the
     road collected by twos in the ditches and then departed with a flight that angled steeply upward to end in a distant tree.
     Crows seemed to hop straight down from the sky to investigate some roadside carnage. From the marshes, I could hear the cackling
     of red-winged blackbirds. Down among the cattle and horses, which were shedding great strips of winter fur, the cowbirds had
     returned. The head of a male cowbird is matte chocolate brown, and its body is a deep, night-bright, iridescent black. Trying
     to stare at the place where those two colors meet evokes a memory that has no name.
    Inevitably I search for defining moments at this time of year. Is it the coming of dandelions? The tribe of vultures that
     gathers in the updrafts? The molting of goldfinches? The hopeful plots of bare dirt—future gardens—newly cut into lawns? In
     this part of the world each day seems to bring a different, contradictory season. But everything points to the first rhubarb
     pie.

May

    I n Manhattan the beauty of the night sky is only a faded metaphor, the shopworn verse of an outdated love song. The stars shine no brighter at midnight in midtown than the ones on the old time-dimmed ceiling of the waiting room at Grand Central Station. But sometimes it’s possible, even in Manhattan, to see the evening star—Venus—descending in the west, presenting her orbit, edgewise, to viewers on Earth. Venus is the luminous body hanging low over New Jersey in the early evening, brighter than any heavenly object visible