Morning comes and bed is a vise from which it is almost impossible to get free. Once up, things seem very fine and there are fires to be made all over the house, and the old dog has to be wrapped in a wool throw because of his rheumatism. (He and I have about the same amount of this trouble, but he makes more fuss about it than I do and is always thinking about wool throws.) Then everybody compares notes, each reads the thermometer for himself, and wonders whether the car will start. From the gray waters of the bay the vapor rises. In the old days when the vapor used to rise from the sea people would wink and say: “Farmer Jones is scalding his hog.”

  The phone jingles. It’s the mailman. He can’t start his car. I’m to pick him up if my car will start and carry him to the town line. The phone rings again (cold weather stirs up the telephone). It’s Mrs. Dow. I am to pick her up on my way back from the store because it’s most too cold to walk it this morning. Thanks to my all-night fire in the drum stove my car starts easily, third time over. The garage is still comfortably warm from the night before and there are embers in the stove.

  The question of clothes becomes a topic for everybody. The small boy, who has relied thus far on a hunting cap with flaps down, digs up an old stocking cap as midwinter gear. I exhume my Army underdrawers, saved from the little war of 1918. The snow squeaks under the rubber tread of the boot, and the windows of the car frost up immediately. The geese, emerging from their hole in the barn, trample a yard for themselves in the deep drift. They complain loudly about a frozen water pan, and their cornmeal mash is golden-yellow against the blue snow.

  The mailman is full of charitable explanations about his car—he thinks it was sediment in the carburetor. The general cheerfulness is in part surprise at discovering that it is entirely possible to exist in conditions that would appear, offhand, to be fatal. The cold hasn’t a chance really against our club, against our walls, our wool, the blaze in the stove, the clever mitten, the harsh sock, the sound of kindling, the hot drink, the bright shirt that matches the bright cap. A truck driver, through the slit in his frosted windshield, grins at me and I grin back through the slit in mine. This interchange, translated, means: “Some cold, Bud, but nothing but what your buggy and my buggy can handle.” Word gets round that the school bus won’t start. Children wait, chilly but busy, along the route, testing surfaces for skis and runners, some of them waiting indoors and peering out the windows. A truckman has to go down and tow the bus to get it started. Scholars will be tardy today. This makes them cheerful. It is a fine thing to be late for school all together in one vast company of mass delinquency, with plenty of support and a cold bus for alibi.

  If a man were in any doubt as to whether it is a cold day or not there is one way he can always tell. On a really cold day the wooden handle of a pitchfork is as cold as a pinchbar. And when he picks up a scrubbing brush to clean out a water pail the brush has turned to stone. I don’t know any object much colder than a frozen brush.

  After a long spell of cold, with little sun and little relief, sometimes a man’s thoughts turn to warmer climates with longing. I have been reading, with considerable pleasure, some essays of James Norman Hall’s on the warmth and indolence of Tahiti. It is alluring, but I doubt that I could last long away from the New England seasons. Under my thatched roof I should remember the days in fall when the wind blows half a gale and the bell on the barn rings without any other compulsion, keeping up a lonely warning like a channel buoy. I should, I am sure, remember the clear sparkling days, bright and cool, that come toward the end of summer, the sort of day my neighbor Mr. Dameron can’t endure. He calls them “suicide days.” Since I too have sometimes been saddened by the last days of August, I have tried to find out what it is about them that clutches at Mr. Dameron’s vitals; but he can only say that he feels depressed, as though something were hanging over him. They provide perfect weather for hauling his traps, but that doesn’t seem in any way to compensate for the melancholy messages he receives, collect, from the white clouds in the perfect sky. In darkness and cold Mr. Dameron is always cheerful; in the difficult, tempestuous periods of the year he is at his best. I have often come upon him in the brutal rain of a bleak November, his big hands swollen from the spines of sea urchins, no jacket over his cotton shirt, erect and at peace with the elements and himself. Evidently it is not bleak times but the intimation of bleak times ahead that makes a man’s spirits sag. There is no word in the language for end-of-summer sadness, but the human spirit has a word for it and picks up the first sound of its approach.

  One of my geese left the flock for a while and lived wild, in the coldest part of winter. She is back in the barnyard again, but it seems to me the other geese have not received her back into their curious society. She stays a little bit apart. I imagine something of this sort would happen if I were to return to the city…. I’m not sure you can ever go back even if you should want to.

  Ik Marvel, who took to the farm almost a century ago, set down some cautionary words on this subject. “On your visits to the city,” he wrote, “friends will remark your seediness, not unkindly, but with an oblique eye-cast up and down your figure—as a jockey measures a stiff-limbed horse, long out to pasture. You may wear what toggery you will—keeping by the old tailors, and showing yourself bien ganté, and carefully read up on the latest dates; still you shall betray yourself in some old dinner joke—dead long ago. And the friends will say kindly, after you are gone, ‘How confoundedly seedy Rus has grown!’ Were this all, it were little. But the clash and alarum of cities have stirred things to their marrow, which you know only outsidedly. The great nervous sensorium of a continent … is packed with subtle and various meanings, which you, living on an outer strand of the web, can neither understand nor interpret. Mere accidental contact will not establish affinity. In a dozen quarters a boy puts you right; and some girl tells you newnesses you never suspected. The rust is on your sword; thwack as hard as you may, you cannot flesh it, as when it had every day scouring into brightness.”

  There is truth in his words. The last time I went to town I had a dozen small reminders that my membership had lapsed. The rust is on my sword. It is a gloomy thought, somewhat mitigated by the realization that my hands are harder than they used to be—I can seize a club and lay about me with that.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  E. B. White was born in Mount Vernon, New York. He graduated from Cornell University in 1921. He joined the staff at The New Yorker, where White’s poems, essays, satirical pieces, and editorials started to appear, as well as in Harper’s. His books include One Man’s Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E. B. White, The Essays of E. B. White, and Poems and Sketches of E. B. White.

  The author of more than twenty books of prose and poetry, White is perhaps best known for his award-winning children’s books, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. White received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1970, and his The Trumpet of the Swan was honored by the International Board on Books for Young People as a distinguished example of literature with international influence.

  For his lifelong contribution to American letters, President John F. Kennedy awarded White the Presidential Medal for Freedom. He also received the 1971 National Medal for Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism. In 1973, White was elected to be a member of the Academy. He also received honorary degrees from seven colleges and universities. White died on October 1, 1985.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 by E. B. White

  Introduction copyright © 1982 by E. B. White

  Copyright renewed © 1997 by Joel White

  Foreword copyright © 1997 by Roger Angell

  Editor’s Note: Three of the pieces in this volume were published first in The New Yorker. “The Summer Catarrh” appeared July 30, 1938, under the title “Daniel Webster, the Hay Fever, and Me.” “The World of Tomorrow” appeared May 13, 1939, under the title “They Came With Joyous Song.” “The Flocks We Watch By Night” appeared November 11, 1939. For the sake of clarity, all the other pieces carry the date when they were written, rather than the date when they appeared in print in Harper’s. The following three pieces appear also in Essays of E. B. White: “On a Florida Key,” “Once More to the Lake,” and “The World of Tomorrow.”

  Cover design by: Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-9018-6

  This edition published in 2023 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  E. B. WHITE

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Find a full list of our authors and titles at www.openroadmedia.com

  FOLLOW US

  @ OpenRoadMedia

 

 

  E. B. White, One Man's Meat

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on GrayCity.Net
Share this book with friends