EARLY OCTOBER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23014, 17 October 1936, Page 8

EARLY OCTOBER

A NEW CITY

By T. S This third month of the calendar spring means more work to the farmer, of which he is more or less glad. The days are only hours of light whereby he can see the multitudinous things to do—harrowing the ground and so forth. It is the anxious time when the fixed prices and the necessary early, not too early, and later, but not overlate, rains are discussed. Later on, the work itself absorbs nearly the whole time. The staple factor in the uncertain paddocks is the man himself. The human, faithful element is never considered, unless he dies. The city shares the harvest of lovely days, fitful gleams, that are only a promise from seasons that have been to seasons that are to come. She feels an exile who has come to share in the work of the city. She feels when she walks that she is too large for the streets. The jostling crowds annoy her. The attractive millinery and feminine things that glamoured her days at home in colourful visions have : gone. She sees in them a school for competition, and clings lovingly to an old hat and bag because they belonged to “ home.” A country poise covers the deadliness of monotony. She becomes absorbed in the work of her employers. Their business becomes her passion. Then the monotony creeps in again—vagrant thoughts steal through the precious, idle seconds—a lamb skipping in his run, a pig and a calf that were hers. Their growth to healthy animalhood was her work. She had planned the vegetable garden plots; even now her back aches, for the feel of a spade and the willing turn of the sod. She dare not memorise on the flower garden. For that was one of the things that bound her to the country home. Everyone’s house in the city faces a street, and there is a plot of green, sometimes, in between a very tiny square' the size of a child’s handkerchief. Then there are flowers, very pretty little borders, but never a weed. At home it is different. On each meticulous square at the green is a precisely-planted .shrub. She might sigh for a decent ' apple or pear or peach in place of the dusty shrubs, so that the passer-by could be amazed at ripe fruits hanging down the palings. . There is a smell in every city street. Sometimes it is only of dust; more often of the housewife’s cauldron. Every cart and bus odourises the town’s business. The drifting scent of orchard blossoms on a still day would breathe a purer spirit. The exile feels flattened and depressed before the end! of a week. Even the churches do not make one at home, for no one seems to recognise anyone else. Then a home person brings a bunch of yellow narcissi. So she watches them and breathes with them and talks to them, or makes them dwell within her inward self. As they stale she freshens. She has stolen their secret, the rapture of growing in a sweeter air, willy-nilly. What can one buy in the city streets—something to wear, or something to eat? The evening stroll takes her, early in October, along a green highway. No more does the asphalt suggest hotly that it is the grave of'all-the grass. Yet no more can she complain of the, home mud. Gladly would she tread there barefoot, and every ooze would shout, “Welcome home! ” For now the twittering sparrows that seem to symbolise the city’s bird life are displaced by a skylark caught in rapture above a willow, and blackbirds that, never yet know how to sing circumspectly. A few catkins were fallen on to the footpath. She watched their parent on the brick wall as if it had been an angel. Yet were they i limp, for the city, had stifled most of their perfume. The girl remembers a canary in its tiny cage, singing, more .loudly, more, frailly than his robust brothers in the open. How composed and comfortable it is in . its small space, often listening to, but not afraid of, electrically driven machinery! They are an inspiration surely to those persons that live within, the scope of its singing. So there is a meekness about the yellow gold plumage, and a lesson that can be a corollary to the sparrow’s song. Shadows, they say, are the wings of the sun, so most often Dunedin folk live under their care. Then flowers and bright green foliage were part of the. sun himself, his painting, glorying like himself in this new season. This is the harvest that flits across the country' paddocks, leaving a memory as beautiful as heaven. This is the feast of the city dweller. This swells the fusion of country and city, and makes the latter place also a pathway to adventure. In the fullness of time perhaps this girl will take her holiday to the country. Never any more can she be a country girl, for the city has polished and poised and perfected her, so that everyone, is astonished and extremely glad at the change. ■... , Perhaps she has accomplished that most'difficult of all—a country heart and a town exterior.