On farm work and the passing of time - Lorna Doone
One of the books I am reading for #Victober is Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore.
Here is a marvelous description of the never-ending tasks on a farm, from summer into autumn:
But the sheep-shearing came and the hay-season next, and then the harvest of small corn, and the digging of the root called “batata” (a new but good thing in our neighbourhood, which our folk have made into “taties”), and then the sweating of the apples, and the turning of the cider-press, and the stacking of the firewood, and netting of the woodcocks, and the springles to be minded in the garden and by the hedgerows, where blackbirds hop to the molehills in the white October mornings, and grey birds come to look for snails at the time when the sun is rising.
It is wonderful how time runs away, when all these things and a great many others come in to load him down the hill and prevent him from stopping to look about. And I for my part can never conceive how people who live in towns and cities, where neither lambs nor birds are (except in some shop windows), nor growing corn, nor meadow-grass, nor even so much as a stick to cut or a stile to climb and sit down upon,—how these poor folk get through their lives without being utterly weary of them, and dying from pure indolence, is a thing God only knows, if His mercy allows Him to think of it.
Page 57 in my Collins Classics edition.