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By Root 1142 0

ceded an extra hour of daylight in the evening, after subtracting an unnoticed hour in the early morning. But when our landlord said “fast time,” I could detect in his throat-clearing a certain contempt the phrase aroused in him: the folly of man-made time. “Slow time”—the preservation of the natural markers of dawn, noon, and dusk—was his response to the harried chasing after artificial objectives. “Slow time” then did not merely refer to a different number on a clock; it was the Minimite acknowledgment of an entirely different structure in life, an entirely different pulse. Leisure didn’t end when work began, but pervaded every moment of the day.

Section II

Growing

Eight

Quickening

As the season progressed, to be sure, there was a discernible quickening in the tempo of activities. Natural time, like light, was not constant but varied according to natural cycles.

At the sun’s gentle insistence each morning, I’d rise at about six-thirty (albeit a little earlier each day until June 21) and stroll over to the barn to milk the cow. The session that at first had produced less than a gallon eventually yielded almost two. Besides increasing the workload, this surge created another challenge.

What would we do with the milk? We didn’t have a refrigerator, but even if we had, there was too much to think of drinking. “Cottage cheese,” said Mrs. Miller. “Cream cheese,” she said. “Butter. Cup cheese. Mozzarella. Monterey Jack. Custard.” Soon Mary had a cookbook open to the cheese section and was boiling vats of milk, hanging socks full of curds from the porch eave, and setting out platters of white ooze to cure. The cottage cheese was easiest and seemed to taste the best.

And still we couldn’t keep up. We were pouring milk into the ground. “You need a pig to drink that up,” somebody said. A pig?

But it was the height of the summer season, and growth and activity were beginning to fill the available space and time. We were busy gardening, zipping up to the Millers’ to tend the pumpkin patch, traversing the community to Sylvan’s to mind the sorghum, and brooding over the canner in the kitchen, even as the Millers continued to entice us with other new opportunities-cum-obligations. We were bent over with armloads of fresh corn, beans, cabbage, and potatoes; we tugged out more surly weeds (hitching up garments that no longer fit us as our waistlines slimmed); cracked open chestfuls of chestnuts from the trees around the garden; learned about grapes and grape jelly; (stealing a few minutes here and there for those sweet, private moments all newlyweds know); loaded up endless jars in the pressure canner; then sorted, labeled, boxed, and—triumphantly—shelved the finished goods in the root cellar (not sure if we loved the homesteading because we loved each other or vice versa).

Knock, knock.

“I can’t believe I forgot to shut the bedroom door.”

Mary looked up in surprise.

“Oops.”

From our bed it was a straight line through the kitchen to the back entrance. And there, peering over the sill of the door, shaded by the brim of a straw hat, were two curious eyes. It was the middle of the afternoon. Mary and I were clothed only in sheets.

Moments later, and a little disheveled, I once again greeted Amos, our regular visitor and farming consultant.

With his slightly beseeching, singsong voice, he made a polite inquiry: “Father wants to know if you’d like to get some apples. There’s a man across the county who needs some help with his, and you get to pick up as many off the ground as you can take.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe, but we’re kinda…busy right now.”

“It’d be for next week sometime.”

“Why don’t we wait and see, and maybe we’ll have the chance to do it.”

“That’s up to you.” He turned to go, then hesitated. “By the way, we fixed the hoe.”

One day I heard a muffled sound in the living room and went to the doorway. There was Mary hunched over the armrest of the easy chair, blowing her nose. Were her allergies acting up? She had been taking medication for this.

When she raised her head I realized her eyes were