The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg Read Free Book Online Page A

from Earth except the sun and moon. Every night people go to bed wondering what strangely bright star that is, and then they’re overtaken by sleep. In the morning no one remembers the question.
    Sometimes you can almost picture the motion of Venus in its orbit, as if you were looking at a diagram of the solar system. Imagine a line between the sun, at sunset, and Venus, glittering high above the horizon. That’s the line of Venus’s orbit. When Venus moves toward Earth, it’s the evening star, and when it moves away from Earth, it becomes the morning star. The moment of transition occurs when Venus passes between the sun and Earth. As the year wears on, Venus appears nearer and nearer the sun, until the planet is engulfed by twilight, and then, before long, Venus will come back into view, at dawn. For now, the evening star—Hesperus, as it was anciently known—is a steadily waning crescent, no matter how starlike or globular its light appears.
    To say, as you must, that Venus is not a star but a planet seems ungrateful somehow, almost pedantic. That’s the kind of technicality Charles Lamb had in mind when defending his personal ignorance almost two hundred years ago. “I guess at Venus,” he wrote, “only by her brightness.” Lamb was no Copernican, and neither are most of us. We are little Ptolemies every one. The sun rises and sets upon us while the earth remains fixed beneath our feet. When you lie in a meadow, deep in country, late at night, etherized by the fullness of the sky, it’s all you can do to imagine the simplest of celestial motions: the pivoting of constellations around the North Star. To impart to each point of light the motions proper to it—to do the calculus of all those interfering rotations, those intersecting gravities—is simply impossible. It’s easier just to imagine that you’re staring at the ceiling of a celestial waiting room.

    L ast weekend I woke up at four in the morning to the smell of rain. Perhaps it was a dream scent. Perhaps a few drops really fell, enough to remind me that the smell of rain is the catalyzed smell of the local earth and everything on it. By the time I got up for good, the ground was as dry as it was when I went to bed, a month dry, after a month without any precipitation. Dust rises from the horses’ hooves when they run across the pasture. Manure dries the way it does in Colorado, to half its weight, then half of that in a day or two. A storm gathered later that afternoon, portentous clouds, and then, as a neighbor with a computerized weather station reported, there came nine-hundredths of an inch, just enough to leaven the upper layer of dust. We have what might be called a big-gulp rain gauge, and it registered no such thing.
    A spring like this teaches people to see a prescience in nature, no matter how skeptical they are. All that snow lying so late into March and April turns out to have been lying there for a reason, to alleviate this long dry spell. Beneath a dry inch or two, the soil is still moist. Mud season lasted only a few hours this year because the melt came so gradually, a sign that the runoff was being slowly, deeply banked in the soil instead of being sluiced away downstream, down-ditch, down-gully.
    The snow disappeared more than a month ago, but I’m still noticing its effects. What remained of the vegetable gardens was mashed flat. In places it looked as if winter had gone through with a stiff brush and a bottle of brilliantine. Winter may have been deep, but it was also soft, and that seems to have suited some species exactly.
    The garlic has never grown so well. Nearly every flowering tree and shrub has mocked the memory of other springs with sheer proliferation of blossoms. A week after the snow left, I started seeing tiny seedlings everywhere—in the garden, across the lawn, throughout the pasture. They looked as if they’d been thickly broadcast by someone with a sure hand. Their seed leaves were dark green, but the first