Great Possessions - David Grayson
GREAT POSSESSIONS
By David Grayson
CHAPTER I
THE WELL-FLAVOURED EARTH
"Sweet as Eden is the air
And Eden-sweet the ray.
No Paradise is lost for them
Who foot by branching root and stem,
And lightly with the woodland share
The change of night and day."
For these many years, since I have lived here in the country, I have had
it in my mind to write something about the odour and taste of this
well-flavoured earth. The fact is, both the sense of smell and the sense
of taste; have been shabbily treated in the amiable rivalry of the
senses. Sight and hearing have been the swift and nimble brothers, and
sight especially, the tricky Jacob of the family, is keen upon the
business of seizing the entire inheritance, while smell, like hairy
Esau, comes late to the blessing, hungry from the hills, and willing to
trade its inheritance for a mess of pottage.
I have always had a kind of errant love for the improvident and
adventurous Esaus of the Earth. I think they smell a wilder fragrance
than I do, and taste sweeter things, and I have thought, therefore, of
beginning a kind of fragrant autobiography, a chronicle of all the good
odours and flavours that ever I have had in my life.
As I grow older, a curious feeling comes often to me in the spring, as
it comes this spring more poignantly than ever before, a sense of the
temporariness of all things, the swiftness of life, the sadness of a
beauty that vanishes so soon, and I long to lay hold upon it as it
passes by all the handles that I can. I would not only see it and hear
it, but I would smell it and taste it and touch it, and all with a new
kind of intensity and eagerness.
Harriet says I get more pleasure out of the smell of my supper than I
get out of the supper itself.
"I never need to ring for you," says she, "but only open the kitchen
door. In a few minutes I'll see you straighten up, lift your head, sniff
a little, and come straight for the house."
"The odour of your suppers, Harriet," I said, "after a day in the
fields, would lure a man out of purgatory."
My father before me had a singularly keen nose. I remember well when I
was a boy and drove with him in the wild North Country, often through
miles of unbroken forest, how he would sometimes break a long silence,
lift his head with sudden awareness, and say to me:
"David, I smell open fields."
In a few minutes we were sure to come to a settler's cabin, a log barn,
or a clearing. Among the free odours of the forest he had caught, afar
off, the common odours of the work of man.
When we were tramping or surveying in that country, I have seen him stop
suddenly, draw in a long breath, and remark:
"Marshes," or, "A stream yonder."
Part of this strange keenness of sense, often noted by those who knew
that sturdy old cavalryman, may have been based, as so many of our
talents are, upon a defect. My father gave all the sweet sounds of the
world, the voices of his sons, the songs of his daughters, to help free
the Southern slaves. He was deaf.
It is well known that when one sense is defective the others fly to the
rescue, and my father's singular development of the sense of smell may
have been due in part to this defect, though I believe it to have been,
to a far larger degree, a native gift. Me had a downright good nose. All
his life long he enjoyed with more than ordinary keenness the odour of
flowers, and would often pick a sprig of wild rose and carry it along
with him in his hand, sniffing at it from time to time, and he loved the
lilac, as I do after him. To ill odours he was not less sensitive, and
was impatient of rats in the barn, and could smell them, among other
odours, the moment the door was opened. He always had a peculiar
sensitiveness to the presence of animals, as of dogs, cats, muskrats,
cattle, horses, and the like, and would speak of them long before he had
seen them or could know that they were about.
I recall once on a wild Northern lake, when we were working along the
shore in a boat, how he stopped suddenly and exclaimed:
"David, do you hear anything?"--for I, a boy, was ears for him in those
wilderness places.
"No, Father. What is it?"
"Indians."
And, sure enough, in a short time I heard the barking of their dogs and
we came soon upon their camp, where, I remember, they were drying deer
meat upon a frame of poplar poles over an open fire. He told me that the
smoky smell of the Indians, tanned buckskin, parched wild rice, and the
like, were odours that carried far and could not be mistaken.
My father had a big, hooked nose with long, narrow nostrils, I suppose
that this has really nothing to do with the matter, although I have
come, after these many years, to look with a curious interest upon
people's noses, since I know what a vehicle of delight they often are.
My own nose is nothing to speak of, good enough as noses go--but I think
I inherited from my father something of the power of enjoyment he had
from that sense, though I can never hope to become the accomplished
smeller he was.
I am moved to begin this chronicle because of my joy this morning
early--a May morning!--just after sunrise, when the shadows lay long
and blue to the west and the dew was still on the grass, and I walked in
the pleasant spaces of my garden. It was so still...so still...that
birds afar off could be heard singing, and once through the crystal air
came the voice of a neighbour calling his cows. But the sounds and the
silences, the fair sights of meadow and hill I soon put aside, for the
lilacs were in bloom and the bush-honeysuckles and the strawberries.
Though no movement of the air was perceptible, the lilacs well knew the
way of the wind, for if I stood to the north of them the odour was less
rich and free than to the south, and I thought I might pose as a prophet
of wind and weather upon the basis of this easy magic, and predict that
the breezes of the day would be from the north--as, indeed, they later
appeared to be.
I went from clump to clump of the lilacs testing and comparing them with
great joy and satisfaction. They vary noticeably in odour; the white
varieties being the most delicate, while those tending to deep purple
are the richest. Some of the newer double varieties seem less
fragrant--and I have tested them now many times--than the old-fashioned
single varieties which are nearer the native stock. Here I fancy our
smooth Jacob has been at work, and in the lucrative process of selection
for the eye alone the cunning horticulturist has cheated us of our
rightful heritage of fragrance. I have a mind some time to practise the
art of burbankry or other kind of wizardy upon the old lilac stock and
select for odour alone, securing ravishing original varieties--indeed,
whole new gamuts of fragrance.
I should devise the most animating names for my creations, such as the
Double Delicious, the Air of Arcady, the Sweet Zephyr, and others even
more inviting, which I should enjoy inventing. Though I think surely I
could make my fortune out of this interesting idea, I present it freely
to a scent-hungry world--here it is, gratis!--for I have my time so
fully occupied during all of this and my next two or three lives that I
cannot attend to it.
I have felt the same defect in the cultivated roses. While the odours
are rich, often of cloying sweetness, or even, as in certain white
roses, having a languor as of death, they never for me equal the
fragrance of the wild sweet rose that grows all about these hills, in
old tangled fence rows, in the lee of meadow boulders, or by some
unfrequented roadside. No other odour I know awakens quite such a
feeling--light like a cloud, suggesting free hills, open country, sunny
air; and none surely has, for me, such an after-call. A whiff of the
wild rose will bring back in all the poignancy of sad happiness a train
of ancient memories old faces, old scenes, old loves--and the wild
thoughts I had when a boy. The first week of the wild-rose blooming,
beginning here about the twenty-fifth of June, is always to me a
memorable time.
I was a long time learning how to take hold of nature, and think now
with some sadness of all the life I lost in former years. The impression
the earth gave me was confused: I was as one only half awake. A fine
morning made me dumbly glad, a cool evening, after the heat of the day,
and the work of it, touched my spirit restfully; but I could have
explained neither the one nor the other. Gradually as I looked about me
I began to ask myself, "Why is it that the sight of these common hills
and fields gives me such exquisite delight? And if it is beauty, why is
it beautiful? And if I am so richly rewarded by mere glimpses, can I not
increase my pleasure with longer looks?"
I tried longer looks both at nature and at the friendly human creatures
all about me. I stopped often in the garden where I was working, or
loitered a moment in the fields, or sat down by the roadside, and
thought intently what it was that so perfectly and wonderfully
surrounded me; and thus I came to have some knowledge of the Great
Secret. It was, after all, a simple matter, as such matters usually are
when we penetrate them, and consisted merely in shutting out all other
impressions, feelings, thoughts, and concentrating the full energy of
the attention upon what it was that I saw or heard at that instant.
At one moment I would let in all the sounds of the earth, at another all
the sights. So we practise the hand at one time, the foot at another, or
learn how to sit or to walk, and so acquire new grace for the whole
body. Should we do less in acquiring grace for the spirit? It will
astonish one who has not tried it how full the world is of sounds
commonly unheard, and of sights commonly unseen, but in their nature,
like the smallest blossoms, of a curious perfection and beauty.
Out of this practice grew presently, and as it seems to me
instinctively, for I cannot now remember the exact time of its
beginning, a habit of repeating under my breath, or even aloud, and in a
kind of singsong voice, fragmentary words and sentences describing what
it was that I saw or felt at the moment, as, for example:
"The pink blossoms of the wild crab-apple trees I see from the hill....
The reedy song of the wood thrush among the thickets of the wild
cherry.... The scent of peach leaves, the odour of new-turned soil in
the black fields.... The red of the maples in the marsh, the white of
apple trees in bloom.... I cannot find Him out--nor know why I am
here...."
Some form of expression, however crude, seemed to reenforce and
intensify the gatherings of the senses; and these words, afterward
remembered, or even written down in the little book I sometimes carried
in my pocket, seemed to awaken echoes, however faint, of the exaltation
of that moment in the woods or fields, and enabled me to live twice
where formerly I had been able to live but once.
It was by this simple process of concentrating upon what I saw or heard
that I increased immeasurably my own joy of my garden and fields and
the hills and marshes all about. A little later, for I was a slow
learner, I began to practise the same method with the sense of smell,
and still later with the sense of taste. I said to myself, "I will no
longer permit the avid and eager eye to steal away my whole attention. I
will learn to enjoy more completely all the varied wonders of the
earth."
So I tried deliberately shutting the doorways of both sight and hearing,
and centring the industry of my spirit upon the flavours of the earth. I
tested each odour narrowly, compared it well with remembered odours, and
often turned the impression I had into such poor words as I could
command.
What a new and wonderful world opened to me then! My takings of nature
increased tenfold, a hundredfold, and I came to a new acquaintance with
my own garden, my own hills, and all the roads and fields around
about--and even the town took on strange new meanings for me. I cannot
explain it rightly, but it was as though I had found a new earth here
within the old one, but more spacious and beautiful than any I had known
before. I have thought, often and often, that this world we live in so
dumbly, so carelessly, would be more glorious than the tinsel heaven of
the poets if only we knew how to lay hold upon it, if only we could win
that complete command of our own lives which is the end of our being.
At first, as I said, I stopped my work, or loitered as I walked, in
order to see, or hear, or smell--and do so still, for I have entered
only the antechamber of the treasure-house; but as I learned better the
modest technic of these arts I found that the practice of them went well
with the common tasks of the garden or farm, especially with those that
were more or less monotonous, like cultivating corn, hoeing potatoes,
and the like.
The air is just as full of good sights and good odours for the worker as
for the idler, and it depends only upon the awareness, the aliveness, of
our own spirits whether we toil like dumb animals or bless our labouring
hours with the beauty of life. Such enjoyment and a growing command of
our surroundings are possible, after a little practice, without taking
much of that time we call so valuable and waste so sinfully. "I haven't
time," says the farmer, the banker, the professor, with a kind of
disdain for the spirit of life, when, as a matter of fact, he has all
the time there is, all that anybody has--to wit, _this_ moment, this
great and golden moment!--but knows not how to employ it. He creeps when
he might walk, walks when he might run, runs when he might fly--and
lives like a woodchuck in the dark body of himself.
Why, there are men in this valley who scout the idea that farming,
carpentry, merchantry, are anything but drudgery, defend all the evils
known to humankind with the argument that "a man must live," and laugh
at any one who sees beauty or charm in being here, in working with the
hands, or, indeed, in just living! While they think of themselves
cannily as "practical" men, I think them the most impractical men I
know, for in a world full of boundless riches they remain obstinately
poor. They are unwilling to invest even a few of their dollars unearned
in the real wealth of the earth. For it is only the sense of the spirit
of life, whether in nature or in other human beings, that lifts men
above the beasts and curiously leads them to God, who is the spirit both
of beauty and of friendliness. I say truly, having now reached the point
in my life where it seems to me I care only for writing that which is
most deeply true for me, that I rarely walk in my garden or upon the
hills of an evening without thinking of God. It is in my garden that all
things become clearer to me, even that miracle whereby one who has
offended may still see God; and this I think a wonderful thing. In my
garden I understand dimly why evil is in the world, and in my garden
learn how transitory it is.
Just now I have come in from work, and will note freshly one of the best
odours I have had to-day. As I was working in the corn, a lazy breeze
blew across the meadows from the west, and after loitering a moment
among the blackberry bushes sought me out where I was busiest. Do you
know the scent of the blackberry? Almost all the year round it is a
treasure-house of odours, even when the leaves first come out; but it
reaches crescendo in blossom time when, indeed, I like it least, for
being too strong. It has a curious fragrance, once well called by a poet
"the hot scent of the brier," and aromatically hot it is and sharp like
the briers themselves. At times I do not like it at all, for it gives me
a kind of faintness, while at other times, as to-day, it fills me with a
strange sense of pleasure as though it were the very breath of the spicy
earth. It is also a rare friend of the sun, for the hotter and brighter
the day, the hotter and sharper the scent of the brier.
Many of the commonest and least noticed of plants, flowers, trees,
possess a truly fragrant personality if once we begin to know them. I
had an adventure in my own orchard, only this spring, and made a fine
new acquaintance in a quarter least of all expected. I had started down
the lane through the garden one morning in the most ordinary way, with
no thought of any special experience, when I suddenly caught a whiff of
pure delight that stopped me short.
"What now can _that_ be?" and I thought to myself that nature had played
some new prank on me.
I turned into the orchard, following my nose. It was not the peach buds,
nor the plums, nor the cherries, nor yet the beautiful new coloured
leaves of the grape, nor anything I could see along the grassy margin of
the pasture. There were other odours all about, old friends of mine, but
this was some shy and pleasing stranger come venturing upon my land.
A moment later I discovered a patch of low green verdure upon the
ground, and dismissed it scornfully as one of my ancient enemies. But
it is this way with enemies, once we come to know them, they often turn
out to have a fragrance that is kindly.
Well, this particular fierce enemy was a patch of chickweed. Chickweed!
Invader of the garden, cossack of the orchard! I discovered, however,
that it was in full bloom and covered with small, star-like white
blossoms.
"Well, now," said I, "are you the guilty rascal?"
So I knelt there and took my delight of it and a rare, delicate good
odour it was. For several days afterward I would not dig out the patch,
for I said to myself, "What a cheerful claim it makes these early days,
when most of the earth is still cold and dead, for a bit of
immortality."
The bees knew the secret already, and the hens and the blackbirds! And I
thought it no loss, but really a new and valuable pleasure, to divert my
path down the lane for several days that I might enjoy more fully this
new odour, and make a clear acquaintance with something fine upon the
earth I had not known before.
CHAPTER II
OF GOOD AND EVIL ODOURS
Of all times of the day for good odours I think the early morning the
very best, although the evening just after sunset, if the air falls
still and cool, is often as good. Certain qualities or states of the
atmosphere seem to favour the distillation of good odours and I have
known times even at midday when the earth was very wonderful to smell.
There is a curious, fainting fragrance that comes only with sunshine and
still heat. Not long ago I was cutting away a thicket of wild spiraea
which was crowding in upon the cultivated land. It was a hot day and
the leaves wilted quickly, giving off such a penetrating, fainting
fragrance that I let the branches lie where they fell the afternoon
through and came often back to smell of them, for it was a fine thing
thus to discover an odour wholly new to me.
I like also the first wild, sweet smell of new-cut meadow grass, not the
familiar odour of new-mown hay, which comes a little later, and is
worthy of its good report, but the brief, despairing odour of grass just
cut down, its juices freshly exposed to the sun. One, as it richly in
the fields at the mowing. I like also the midday smell of peach leaves
and peach-tree bark at the summer priming: and have never let any one
else cut out the old canes from the blackberry rows in my garden for the
goodness of the scents which wait upon that work.
Another odour I have found animating is the odour of burning wastage in
new clearings or in old fields, especially in the evening when the smoke
drifts low along the land and takes to itself by some strange chemical
process the tang of earthy things. It is a true saying that nothing will
so bring back the emotion of a past time as a remembered odour. I have
had from a whiff of fragrance caught in a city street such a vivid
return of an old time and an old, sad scene that I have stopped,
trembling there, with an emotion long spent and I thought forgotten.
Once in a foreign city, passing a latticed gateway that closed in a
narrow court, I caught the odour of wild sweet balsam. I do not know now
where it came from, or what could have caused it--but it stopped me
short where I stood, and the solid brick walls of that city rolled aside
like painted curtains, and the iron streets dissolved before my eyes,
and with the curious dizziness of nostalgia, I was myself upon the hill
of my youth--with the gleaming river in the valley, and a hawk sailing
majestically in the high blue of the sky, and all about and everywhere
the balsams--and the balsams--full of the sweet, wild odours of the
north, and of dreaming boyhood.
And there while my body, the shell of me, loitered in that strange city,
I was myself four thousand miles and a quarter of a century away,
reliving, with a conscious passion that boyhood never knew, a moment
caught up, like a torch, out of the smouldering wreckage of the past.
Do not tell me that such things die! They all remain with us-all the
sights, and sounds, and thoughts of by-gone times awaiting only the
whiff from some latticed gateway, some closed-in court to spring again
into exuberant life. If only we are ready for the great moment!
As for the odour of the burning wastage of the fields at evening I
scarcely know if I dare say it. I find it produces in the blood of me a
kind of primitive emotion, as though it stirred memories older than my
present life. Some drowsy cells of the brain awaken to a familiar
stimulus--the odour of the lodge-fire of the savage, the wigwam of the
Indian. Racial memories!
But it is not the time of the day, nor the turn of the season, nor yet
the way of the wind that matters most but the ardour and glow we
ourselves bring to the fragrant earth. It is a sad thing to reflect that
in a world so overflowing with goodness of smell, of fine sights and
sweet sounds, we pass by hastily and take so little of them. Days pass
when we see no beautiful sight, hear no sweet sound, smell no memorable
odour: when we exchange no single word of deeper understanding with a
friend. We have lived a day and added nothing to our lives! A blind,
grubbing, senseless life--that!
It is a strange thing, also, that instead of sharpening the tools by
which we take hold of life we make studied efforts to dull them. We seem
to fear life and early begin to stop our ears and close our eyes lest we
hear and see too much: we clog our senses and cloud our minds. We seek
dull security and ease and cease longer to desire adventure and
struggle. And then--the tragedy of it--the poet we all have in us in
youth begins to die, the philosopher in us dies, the martyr in us dies,
so that the long, long time beyond youth with so many of us becomes a
busy death. And this I think truer of men than of women: beyond forty
many women just begin to awaken to power and beauty, but most men beyond
that age go on dying. The task of the artist, whether poet, or musician,
or painter, is to keep alive the perishing spirit of free adventure in
men: to nourish the poet, the prophet, the martyr, we all have in us.
One's sense of smell, like the sense of taste, is sharpest when he is
hungry, and I am convinced also that one sees and hears best when
unclogged with food, undulled with drink, undrugged with smoke. For me,
also, weariness, though not exhaustion, seems to sharpen all the
senses. Keenness goes with leanness. When I have been working hard or
tramping the country roads in the open air and come in weary and hungry
at night and catch the fragrance of the evening along the road or upon
the hill, or at barn-doors smell the unmilked cows, or at the doorway,
the comfortable odours of cooking supper how good that all is! At such
times I know Esau to the core: the forthright, nature-loving, simple man
he was, coming in dabbled with the blood of hunted animals and hungry
for the steaming pottage.
It follows that if we take excessive joys of one sense, as of taste,
nature, ever seeking just balances, deprives us of the full enjoyment of
the others, "I am stuffed, cousin," cries Beatrice in the play, "I
cannot smell." "I have drunk," remarks the Clown in Arcady, "what are
roses to me?" We forget that there are five chords in the great scale of
life--sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and--few of us ever master
the chords well enough to get the full symphony of life, but are
something like little pig-tailed girls playing Peter Piper with one
finger while all the music of the universe is in the Great Instrument,
and all to be had for the taking.
Of most evil odours, it can be said that they are temporary or
unnecessary: and any unpleasant odour, such as that of fruit sprays in
spring, or fertilizer newly spread on the land, can be borne and even
welcomed if it is appropriate to the time and place. Some smells, evil
at first, become through usage not unpleasant. I once stopped with a
wolf-trapper in the north country, who set his bottle of bait outside
when I came in. He said it was "good and strong" and sniffed it with
appreciation. I agreed with him that it was strong. To him it was not
unpleasant, though made of the rancid fat of the muscallonge. All nature
seems to strive against evil odours, for when she warns us of decay she
is speeding decay: and a manured field produces later the best of all
odours. Almost all shut-in places sooner or later acquire an evil odour:
and it seems a requisite for good smells that there be plenty of
sunshine and air; and so it is with the hearts and souls of men. If they
are long shut in upon themselves they grow rancid.