Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White

which are a sort of drag, or they use a two-wheel trailer drawn by a tractor. My tractor is quite old now, and has faded to a pretty color—zinnia pink, like a red shirt that has been much washed. When I bought it, it was a fire-engine red, but now it can slink away into the woods and go out of sight as quickly as a little animal. An hour or so later it reappears, dragging a load of wood to add to the pile. Arthur Cole arrived one blustery afternoon after work, trailing his sawing machine behind his coupé, and sawed almost all of our six and a half cords before dark. Arthur is seventy-six and dearly loves to saw wood. He still has all ten fingers. He is working on his twenty-three-thousandth cord, having been at it—mostly at odd moments, before or after work—for forty-nine years. He has a record of every stick of wood that has been through his machine, and can show it to you, in cords and in dollars—the plain accounting of a man who has never been able to leave work alone. When he started sawing, forty nine years ago, he used to get fifty cents a cord. Now he gets two dollars. “You handle a lot of big money now,” he said as I handed him thirteen dollars, “but you’re no better off.” He has had many accidents, and on a couple of occasions has had to be sewn together, so that he could be out early the next morning to saw more wood. Once, the saw threw a stick at him and caught his upper plate, driving it into his jaw. Dry wood is more treacherous than green wood, and sometimes Arthur wears a catcher’s mask when he finds the saw throwing knucklers at him. He does not always take money for his work—just swings in with his machine at the house of someone who is disabled, and starts sawing.
    At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream. A new house has been built about twenty miles from here by a man who has plenty of money to spend, and he has equipped it with an automotic light-boosting system, so that as soon as the sun begins losing its strength in the afternoon, electric lights come on all through the place, maintaining an even intensity of illumination at all times. I wouldn’t care for that one bit. I like to come in from chores and find the early dark in the rooms, when the only gleam is a single lamp over an amaryllis bulb on which my wife is practicing some sort of deception. I like groping my way into the barn cellar at six, where my two whiteface heifers are feeding at the rack, their great white heads visible, their dark bodies invisible—just two heads suspended in air, as neatly as John the Baptist’s. I should think a house in which the light never varies would be as dull as a woman in whom the emotions were always the same. I am reasonably sure, however, that the trick lighting system will go on the blink every once in a while, and that the owner will creep around with a flashlight, the way all the rest of us do, to find the seat of darkness.
    It’s been fifteen years since we last wintered in this house. Settling in again to live steadily right around the year, as we used to do, has been full of excitement and the sense of our changed condition. (Anybody who is fifteen years older is in a changed condition, no matter what his condition.) There is no schoolboy in the house now to keep the air stirred up. The room he once occupied now contains a television set; we sit there in stupefaction, listening to “April Love” and learning how to set our hair. Other gadgets have crept in, most of them in the back kitchen.
    The days ahead unroll in the mind, a scroll of blessed events in garden and in barn. Wherever you look, you see something that advertises the future: in the heifer’s sagging sides you see the calf, in the cock’s shrill crow you hear the pipping egg, in the cache of warm topsoil down cellar next to the furnace you see the seedling, and even on the darkest day