“Stay years if you would know

The work and thought, the pleasure

And grief, the feat, by which

This vision lives. In fall

You Plow the bottomland

For corn, the heavy ground,

So frost will work the clods.

When it’s too wet to plow,

Go to the woods to fell

Trees for next winter’s fuel.

Take the inferior trees

And not all from one place,

So that the woods will yield

Without diminishment,

Then trim and rick the logs’

And when you drag them out

From  woods to rick, use horses

Whose hooves are kinder to

The ground than wheels. In spring

The traces of your work

Will be invisible.”

• Wendell Berry, The Farm

 

I love Wendell Berry’s writing about farming, the vision here is Moise’s more than mine, a reason I admire him so much. But it’s my vision also, even if I am too late to live it fully.

I am not a farmer, but a writer who lives on a farm and loves the vision, which lives in the pastures, the fences, the trees and springs, the barn, the old spoons and cups that ooze up out of the ground in mud season.

Stay years if you would know the work, the thought, the pleasure. I have. I will.