PEACEFUL, PATIENT, WAITING FIELDS OF AMERICA

Head Frog of Rustling Brook is one of my fictitious characters. Sometimes he even gets into print by publishers with a kindred spirit. He lives in the Rustling Brook that runs through the Grassy Meadow nearby the Deep Forest, all of which faintly resemble brooks, meadows, woods and frogs I have known.

Head Frog has enormous eyes, a sufficient number of spots and, of course, is green. What sets him apart, amazingly, is that he can read and speak the English language. "Just a gift from the Giver," he explains unpretentiously to those of his friends who stand in trembling awe. "We all have gifts," he explains. "Some can move, sight unseen, beneath the ground; others can crack a hickory nut."

Due to his accumulated years, Head Frog and I have something in common now. When we wake from sleep, or get hit on the head by a gigging pole or cabinet door, it jars our thought words out of lace, and it may take fifteen minutes to get them in order again so that they make sense and we can get on with the thought we had and the action that would follow.

I awoke pleasantly enough one recent morning, having had, still half asleep, that good sense of well being when one is beginning to for a good thought for the day ahead. Bending over, still sleepily, to pick up a shoe, I raised my head too near the window sill and there went my forming thought words. Some whizzed out my ears, some bumped cranium, mandible and hyoid bones of my skull.

I tried to silently gather the thought words together one by one field...go...not...why but other more audible sizzling words kept interfering.

By the time the bump went down and the coffee too, the words filled in like Vanna White's big board. They were, "Why not today, go see the winter fields?" I felt as if I had won the big prize.

After the social and decorative saturation at the end of a year, I like to drive out to my favorite fields to the west. I call them mine by Visual Right of Eminent Domain. They are lessons in patience now, lying stretched out to the sun, the rain, the snow, the frost, whatever may come.

The wind sweeps bleakly over the dried grass or the plowed ridges. "Where is life?" it seems to whisper. "Why have you died, fields? You who were so green, so fertile, so giving of rich produce?" But the fields just lie quiet, waiting, resting, biding their time.

Meanwhile they are hosts to rabbits, mice, moles, woodchucks, worms and sleeping beetles. Tracks of livestock, wildlife and men crisscross their broad acres. Little cups of water are held and frozen and thawed and frozen and thawed again. Birds gather round the little cups and drink and chatter and perhaps speak of better days ahead when the greening will come and bluets will spring up and blackberry canes will bloom in the corners.

Time was when fields were fenced and, once fenced, they seldom changed their boundaries. One wonders why they were marked off as they were. Was there a cow path going this way once? An Indian trail? Does the soil suddenly change here, making it better for wheat on one side and corn on the other? Or was there a line of cedar trees that could be cut back for fence posts?

Fields were once fenced to keep out the livestock. Now the livestock is fenced to keep it out of the fields. Therefore, many fields are not fenced anymore and only a brown furrow separates the corn from the beans, wheat, oats or cotton. One can walk for miles over his farm without having to climb over, roll under or go through a gate.

I think I like the fenced fields better for there are so many interesting things to find in the fence rows, especially if they are not kept too clean and, in the interest of wildlife conservation, they shouldn't be. Walking along even in wintertime when all seems so bare and bleak, a cottontail will start up seemingly from right under one's feet, or more startling still, a covey of quail will whir up and out. Honeysuckle thickets quiver with small bird life. Last year's bird nests will be revealed in bush and shrub and weed clumps allowing one to study the marvelous construction and decide which species built it. Old silvered goldenrod still stands, a testament to the color that was and will be again.

Fenced or not, I stand looking at the resting winter fields, aware that their gifts have been converted into the food chain which keeps us able to stand and look. I am intensely aware of the good earth and its basic meaning for mankind, And should my feet make an imprint on a brown furrow, no abuse is meant. It is more of a caress of love and humble thankfulness for contact with a fundamental.

I stopped the car after I had crossed a familiar old bridge and walked the short distance down to the water's edge. The bank was muddy and a foot sunk deep until it felt something semi-hard. It was probably a rock, but what if it had been Head Frog's head? Had I addled him out of his wintertime rest? Maybe I had scattered his sleepy wintertime thoughts of coming up out of his hole into a pleasant, green world, Oh well, 'tis still January, plenty of time for those thought words to get straightened out again before the bluets spring up and fiddlehead ferns begin to uncurl.

REJOICE!