"Why did not these enjoyments last?”

Observations on a late summer morning

By CLAUDIA JOHNSON

Though it will be scorching before days end, when I fed my hungry cats just after sunrise this morning, a cool suggestion of fall exhilarated me as it teased the September air.
I was reminded of Thoreau’s observation at Walden Pond, "Morning is when I awake and there is dawn in me."
I was reminded also of how I love Giles County's hills and creeks and breathtaking landscapes, the kinds of places I longed for in the 10 years I lived away.
Nothing is more luscious than certain big fields I've passed all my life…those fields whose seasons I know intimately. There's one that is equally seductive when it is freshly turned, all brown and smelling fertile in spring and when it is green with tall corn stalks in midsummer or yellow after harvest or even when the bare stalks are snow-sprinkled. This field was one of the first to be planted when Campbellsville was settled around 1810 and has been planted most likely every season, except perhaps during the War Between the States, but maybe even then. It is where the local militia mustered in the early days of the county, and mini balls are still unearthed nearly 14 decades after the skirmish there just days before the Battle of Franklin.
Emerson in Nature asked, "What is a farm but a mute gospel?" and noted that the "moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him."
And to think he never saw this field.
Another lovely place is the pleached drive from Highway 31 to the Milky Way house where the trees form a green canopy over the road. My Granddaddy Carvell helped plant those trees during the depression when he was a young man, married with three little girls, one of which was my precious mother.
In almost any season, but particularly in summer, early morning before the wet heat of the day, driving toward Frankewing from the west just as the last hill is crested, the full impact of our magnificent hills fringed with hovering steam can bring tears to my eyes, and does.
I always think, when I see this sight, of the psalmist David who said, "I lift my eyes unto the hills, from where I receive my strength."
It is no surprise that acclaimed novelist Donald Davidson of Campbellsville and poet John Crowe Ransom of Pulaski were instrumental in a major movement in American literature at the turn of the 20th Century. These “Agrarian” writers believed that man was inextricably bound to the land with a connection far beyond the physical, extending into the moral and the spiritual. Later, William Faulkner developed the belief to a Nobel-prize winning extreme, illustrating in his tales of the Compsons and the Snopses how severance from the land brings about moral decadence.
My sense of the land is more basic. Our family planted potatoes and raised cows and hoed gardens and pulled weeds. Mostly, I just wanted to hurry up and finish so I could read. But on a cool country morning of every summer of my childhood long before I knew Emerson or Faulkner, I knew the feel of freshly turned dirt on bare feet as I followed Daddy on a plow delivering potatoes from within the long straight rows. My mother, unaware that her family came to this county when that very potato field was still in Chickasaw territory, sat the wooden baskets along the rows so that Barry and I could deposit our buckets of translucent-skinned potatoes.
I do love the land now and the memory of it.
"Why did not these enjoyments last?” Shakespeare asked, perhaps inquiring just for me, then rejoined, “How sweetly wasted I the day, while innocence allow'd to waste."