The herbs are spreading; how silver-gray the sage grows, how blue the borage flower. The weeds in the garden begin to have their way, after the first week in July.
There is a new school of thought, as a matter of wonder, that believes in weeds! Their shade keeps moisture in the soil, they say.
Time to pick the ripe vegetables, time to can, preserve, and freeze. Those first tender green string beans must be gathered at just the right moment before they begin to harden their pods in maturity. The first baby beets are the ones to put down in jars, either pickled or plain, and of course our old friend, the chard, is doing its stuff all too faithfully.

When it gets ahead of us, Jill cuts the biggest leaves and gives them to the chickens for a special treat.

Rose Wilder Lane has the best device for storing jars I ever saw. She takes old bricks and supports her shelves on them. she can thus raise or lower a shelf by adding or subtracting a brick. The shelves may be taken down for cleaning. And it looks neat and tailored.

The sky is wonderful in July, it seems deeper and farther off someway than at any other time, a silken, burning blue. The thermometer jumps like a jumping mouse, and the beans ripening like mad. butterflies flicker over the pale blue and dark blue delphinium, a hummingbird flickers also, in a different rhythm in the border. At night the nicotiana sends a heady tropical sweetness in the air. flowers that smell sweet only at night are very special, they live a life of moon and stars, and are always mysterious, it seems to me.

I always remember one July night when a very tired man who was visiting us, suddenly disappeared. We finally got to wondering and went out to look him up. he was lying flat on the lemon thyme in the Quiet Garden, and he said he was just smelling. Let him alone. The nicotiana was opening deep bells then, and the stars were opening out in the sky, and he was just taking it all in lying down!

Stillmeadow Daybook

It is strange how thoughts lie in the mind in different strata, like rock on a mountain outcrop. sometimes I wish I could
just plain think on one level, get it all dug up and over with. But I never can: just as I get well into a lovely lyric vein, I find a little idea has chipped into it, and there in my hand is a worry about next winter's coal; below that, I am still thinking of the canned ravioli I had for lunch, and wondering whether I could make it; and far down I suddenly remember a day in my childhood, and my mother sitting down to rest briefly in the lawn swing. The lawn swing smelled of varnish, and the grass swished under the slat floor and the seats were shaky.

I suppose everything that happens remains in the heart or mind forever - no doubt psychiatrists could explain it all to me - but I keep on being amazed at the variety of feeling in a lifetime. One small, ordinary human being is capable of such joy, such grief, so much hope and despair and peace and conflict.

As long as there is a sky overhead there is beauty, something to live for. Early in the morning, when the birds begin, the light is an infusion of gold through my curtains. All the new insistent green of the world, and the glowing color from a thousand blossoms are in it, and the smell is so heavenly sweet it aches in the heart.

As I watch the early light I got to thinking about the nature of happiness; perhaps it takes a whole lifetime to become aware of it. We have it like a hidden pearl, or we have it not. It is something within ourselves. It is a quality of personality, and therefore no human being can give it to another. We surround our lover, husband, wife, friend with everything we can do for them, but in the end each man makes his own happiness in the adjustment of his personality to living.

This is the reason the happy people you know are often those who seem to have the least. They are the mature people, who accept life and its limitations and still respond with a quality of joy to it.

I reflect further, if we cannot give it to people, does that mean that we should not do things for others? Certainly not. We should live every day so as to give the most to those around us. The best of life is sharing of ourselves, the giving.

When I think of happiness I know, of course, that in any life there must be so much of suffering, so much of sorrow, Particularly in the world we know today, the sum of anguish beggars description. Our personal losses shadow forth the great loss of the world. But those who meet grief with courage have a kind of inner glow about them; their courage imparts strength to others; they are, in a sense, the happy people. for them there is no defeat in death.

The moonlight is whiter than pearl over the meadow these July nights. The small businessesof the day and the worries are magicked away by the soft glow. You can step from the door of the little white house into a white foam of moonlight on the dark crest of the wave of night.
Esmé steps delicately, on her cinnamon velvet feet, along the terrace where the dew has not fallen. Her eyes are lit with moonlight; they are sapphire flame. On the fence, black Tigger sits, his body melting in night, but his eyes shining, too, pure topaz or sea green as the light reflects in them

The meadow is very still and beautiful in the summer night. a silvery mist rises. The barn and the maple trees and the house look as if they had been dipped in melted silver, too. The bright splendor of the moon transmutes the apple orchard into a place of dreams.

"Stay a little, summer, do not go," I whisper, as I take a last look around me before I go in.

The Book of Stillmeadow

Cocker Puppies

The  fifteen puppies ( three litters all born the same week ) are eight weeks old. I took a pan out to their house with their first fish dinner, canned mackerel. Two of them plunged in bodily and lay down in the fish in their excitement. A puppy completely imbedded in mackerel is something to clean up! A third puppy lost her balance and stood on her head, hind legs waving frantically. Finally the stern was righted and she came up, breathless but triumphant.

There are always several who are like the children that announce at the beginning of every meal, "I don't eat much." They sit back, looking up at me, Then they take a slight nibble. They make a great to-do about it, lick their paws and scamper around, one eye on me. And generally, then. they nip in and get enough to fill their stomachs. And there are some who eat like an army on the march, gobbling vehemently until they can only waddle on fat legs. When they are as tight as drums, they collapse where they are and begin to doze, sleeping so as to get up an appetite for more.

The grown dogs consider them, on the whole, a frightful nuisance. Windy has a red son who is a miniature replica of him, and he nipped him severely for following him around. Pussy, on the other hand, plays with them like another puppy, and looks like one. she will never be anything but a puppy, not even after all the families she has had. Her own five and the other ten drag at her ears and stumble under her with equal pleasure. she plays a curious kind of tag with them, in and out, urging them on to tear after her.

Sister thinks nothing of them. Even her own puppies bore her after a few weeks. "Children don't amuse me," she says, with her nose in the air. So they like nothing better than to persecute her. They creep up and pounce and when Sister nips them, they scream that they have been killed. In five minutes, they pounce again.

When the dogs eat, they have their own pans and they start busily with their own dinner. But after a little while they invariably shift. honey will push her blonde muzzle into Windy's dish. windy, after a single growl, looks up and runs to honey's dish and eats rapidly. meanwhile clover and Bonnie have exchanged. Usually they circle like merry-go-rounds until all the bowls are empty. I suppose that this is on the very human theory that someone else's meal is better than their own.

Needless to say, Star is no prey to this illusion. What's hers is hers, and let anyone put a nose in it on peril of his life! She is a supreme individualist and goes in for no form of sharing.

Thinking over my life with dogs, which has been a twenty-four year stretch - well, even more as I had an American water spaniel when I was about eleven, I consider that if I did not have a dog or several dogs to wait on, I would feel rather odd. The gay and gentle cockers and the wild and enchanting Irish make for a very good household.

I do not resent non-dog-lovers, I feel sorry for them. I think how much they miss, of rich loyalty and love and warm welcome home when they go away and the cosy feeling of a soft velvet nose pressed in the palm if one feels sad. Nine dogs isn't many, I decide as I wash the pans and let four in and five out.

From Stillmeadow Daybook

Coming out of church Sunday, I looked up at the spire. Esther Forbes, in her delightful book, Rainbow on the Road, calls the New England church spires "icicles in the sky." This is a happy description. For the spires look so slender lifting above the green valleys. And they have a pure clean silhouette.
A church without a spire is not a church to me. I have seen some modern churches, low, flat, shed-like in shape. Or looking like a collapsed balloon. now a lifting line is an inspiration to me, a flat line is not. My eyes can follow our steeple up into the infinite blue and my thoughts are lifted nearer to god.

Our church, re-roofed in 1732, has not been changed much. When we worship there, we go in automobiles and park them where the old carriage shed stood, but the church itself has the traditional architecture, simple, dignified. Sun slants through the small-paned windows. The furnace is a concession to our modern weakness and the dark pews now have pads on them. The lighting works by switches instead of tapers being carried about. But the church itself is still the kind of sanctuary that Lafayette and Washington visited when they came through our valley, and I like to think they would still feel quite at home in it.

From Stillmeadow Sampler

A July night has a special quality, the hot air is ebbing over the meadow and a faint cool breath steals in, delicious and exciting. Mist brims the meadow now, and a silvery look is about the world.

In George's barn, a cow gives forth a soft mooing, and one of the Kellogg's dogs bays in the distance. How still it is, here in the little fold of the valley on a hot summer night!
I feel the world revolving around me, I hear in an inner ear the troubled voice of the times, but the stars come so bright and clear upon the sky, and the moon rises so slow and steady that I cannot feel the turbulence of life, only the steadfastness of the seasons.
Suddenly I feel I am everywhere, this is a strange feeling.
I am in the rose garden of my Bombay India friend, whom I have never seen, who writes that her son has married a "decent Parsi." I am in an igloo on the deep green-black ice-cap with the son of my friend in Washington, living on K rations just to see if this is possible. And I am in the desert with the mountains rising so purple and violet above the golden sand while Smiley Burnette strums his guitar and sings cowboy songs.

I am in the eighteenth-century bakery in Williamsburg talking to Parker Crutchfield as he bakes the gentleman's bread and the household bread in the great ovens. Candles flare, and the night is hot, and the life of yesterday moves against the life of today.

But I am actually right on the worn doorstep of the old white farmhouse, and I call the dogs in and close the door. I may have been a thousand miles away in five minutes, but I am, after all, at home.

And the moon is right over my apple tree, and this is July in New England. The mind makes many journeys, but the heart stays at home.

Gladys Taber: Page One / Gladys Taber: Page Two

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Credit also goes to:

All of the wonderful people I have met since starting this page and the help that they have given me!

My special thanks to Jim Zimmerlin for the picture of the beautiful cocker puppies

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Copyright © 1997, 1998. Susan Stanley.