Tea Kettle and the Cornfield

Each morning, Clyde would get up and slowly make his way down the thin, creaky stairs and today was no different except for a feeling. At the landing, he stops to catch his breath and at the same time, he takes in two lung fulls of fresh, farm air. Clyde's an elderly gent, living in the farm house his great-grandfather built in 1874. Though times have changed, the encroaching effects of city life have not reached his part of the country.

Socks skitters by then quickly turns around to graze up against Clyde's leg. With a purr and two sweeps, he heads back into the front room to take his spot at the bay window. Clyde takes one last inhale of the dewy air and grins peacefully. He strolls into the kitchen to begin his morning ritual: Hot tea, seven grain toast with real butter, and the Farmer's Almanac. It was something his father did when he was just a boy. Clyde learned to run a farm, raise the horses, harvest the corn, and be the longevity his father never got to see. He drifts into memory ...

It was just before the sun came up during the Spring in 1940. Clyde felt the pressure of his door to his room before he even heard the swing or saw it open. He seemed to know to open his eyes before he even knew what was going on. Stumbling in was Clyde's mother; eyes and cheeks saturated with tears but she never made a sound. She was always a quiet woman even during the toughest of times. She stood with the dawn's creeping light coming in from the hall window behind her making her seem more like a shadow. As she eased into the room silently, Clyde could see the glinting of his night light on her cheeks. Then he saw her eyes. Saw into them and saw what she was quietly not saying.

He gazed up and stared at the ceiling feeling a tear well into the corner of his left eye. It took a moment before the warm tear made a cool streak down his cheek but he knew what happened. His mother stayed in the doorway for some time as Clyde eventually sat up and turned his small feet to the floor. Normally, the winter-influenced wood would have him quickly grabbing his slippers with his two big toes from under the bed but he did not flinch that time. He stood up slowly and made his way to his mother to hold her--so she could hold him as the sirens of a distant ambulance made its way up Elwood Country Rd.

The tea kettle began to bring up its quiet and then sudden whistle. Today's weather calls for dissipating fog in the morning, sunny skies with patchy clouds, and possible showers by late afternoon. Clyde knew rain was coming, though. It rained that day he remembers and he knows that smell; that feel he gets in his very bones. The years have been fairly good to him, he has grown to admire that sense of rain and looks forward to the continued nurturing Mother Nature is going to give his corn crops today. It's hope for him.

Socks purrs loudly from the window seat as Clyde sips his tea. The Almanac is on the table folded open with the pages down just off center of the lace doily his mother made years ago. He can see up the stairs to the hallway as the shadow of the hall window makes a line along the wall just before his old bedroom door. Clyde lets out a sigh and takes in the moment. Again.

CMW

An Old Man's Winter Night

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

Robert Frost
1874–1963, American poet