Chapter 44 Acoustic - 2

My house is on the side of a hill, just on the edge of a larger forest, in the middle of a grove of pines and hickories, six rods from the lake, and a narrow path leads from the hillside to to the lake.In my front yard grew strawberries, blackberries, and everlastings, foxtails, goldenrods, shrub oaks and wild cherry trees, lingonberries and groundnuts.At the end of May, the wild cherry (scientific name Cerasus pumila) is decorated with fine flowers on both sides of the path, and the short flower stalks are surrounded by umbrella-shaped flower clusters. In autumn, there are large and beautiful wild cherries. hanging down like rays of light in all directions.They weren't tasty, but for Mother Nature's sake, I tried them.The sumac tree (Rhus glabra) grows profusely around the house, lifting up a low wall I had built, and growing five or six feet in the first season.Its broad, pinnate, tropical leaves are oddly pleasing to the eye.In late spring gigantic buds spring suddenly from dry, seemingly dead branches, and, magically, blossom into soft, blue, soft branches an inch in diameter; sometimes, as I sit The windows, they grow so unruly, bending their own weak joints, I hear a fresh soft branch snap, and though there is not a breath of wind it is weighed down by its own weight like a lupine. fall down.In August the profusion of berries, which in flower had tempted so many wild bees, also gradually took on their brilliant velvet tints, and, too, weighed down under their own weight, broke at last their delicate limbs.

On this summer afternoon, when I sat at the window, hawks circled my clearings, wild doves flew into my sight in twos and threes, or perched restlessly on the branches of whitebark pine behind my house, toward There was a cry from the sky; an osprey pecked out a dimple on the water and took a fish; a mink sneaked out of the swamp in front of my door and caught a frog on the bank; Passing here and there, the sedges bowed under their weight; and for half an hour I heard the chugging of railroad cars, now subdued and now loud again, like partridges chugging. Flap your wings and ship travelers from Boston to this country.I don't live out of the world either, unlike the kid I heard he was sent to a farmer on the east side of the city, but he didn't stay long before he ran away and came home with worn heels Broken, he was really homesick.He had never seen such a dreary and remote place; the people were all gone; you couldn't even hear their pipes!I very much doubt that there is such a place in Massachusetts now:

Truly, our village has become a target, Hit by a railroad that flies like an arrow, In the fields of peace, it is Concord - the sound of harmony. The Fitchburg Railroad touches the lake about a hundred rods south of where I live.I often walked along its causeway to the village, as if by this chain I was connected with society.The people on the truck ran back and forth across the entire line, greeted me, and treated me as an old friend. They passed by many times. They thought I was a hired worker, but I was indeed a hired worker.I am very willing to be a road maintenance worker for a certain section of the earth's orbit.

Summer and winter, the locomotive's whistle pierced my woods, like the screech of an eagle flying over a farm yard, informing me that many restless city merchants had arrived within the circle of the town, or had come from In the other direction came some village traders.They are on the same horizon, and they warn each other to get out of the way, a call sometimes heard in both villages.Country, here comes your groceries; country people, your food!No one can live independently and dare to say "no" to them.Then the rustic sirens whistled, and here is the price you pay them!Long battering rams of timber rushed at our walls at a speed of twenty miles an hour, and there were plenty of chairs for all the burdened within the circle to sit on now.The country sends the city a chair with the courtesy of such a gigantic timber.All the huckleberries from the Indian hills were picked, and all the snowball berries were brought into town.Cotton is up, textiles are down: silk is up, wool is down, books are up, but the mind that writes them is down.