There is a purple haze over the hill tops and a hint of sadness in the sunshine, because of summer’s departure; on the low ground down by the spring the walnuts are dropping from the trees and squirrels are busy hiding away their winter supply. Here and there the leaves are beginning to change color and a little, vagrant, autumn breeze goes wandering over the hiss and down the valleys whispering to “follow, follow,” until it is almost impossible to resist. So I should not be too harshly criticized if I ramble a little even in my conversation.
We have been gathering the fruits of the season’s work into barns and bins and cellars. The harvest has been abundant and a good supply is stored away for future needs.
Now I am wondering what sort of fruits, and how plentiful the supply, we have stored away in our hearts and souls and minds from our year’s activities. The time of gathering together the visible results of our year’s labor is a very appropriate time to reckon up the invisible, more important harvest.
When we lived in South Dakota, where the cold came early and strong, we once had a hired man (farmers had them in those days), who was a good worker, but whose money was too easily spent. In the fall when the first cold wind struck him, he would shiver and chatter and always he would say, “Gee Mighty! This makes a feller wonder what’s become of his summer’s wages!”
Ever since then, Harvest Home time has seemed to me the time to gather together and take stock of our mental and spiritual harvest, and to wonder what we have done with the wealth of opportunity that has come to us and the treasures we have had in our keeping. Much too often I have felt like quoting the hired man of other days.
Have we found a new friendship worth while? Have we even kept safely the old friendships, treasures worth much more than silver and gold? People in these history-making days hold their opinions so strongly and defend them so fiercely, that a strain will be put upon many friendships, and the pity of it is that these misunderstandings will come between people who are earnestly striving for the right thing. Right seems to be obscured and truth is difficult to find.
But if the difficulty of finding the truth has increased our appreciation of its value, if the beauty of truth is plainer to us and more desired, then we have gathered treasure for the future.
We lay away the gleanings of our years in the edifice of our character, where nothing is ever lost. What have we stored away, in this safe place during the season that is past? Is is something that will keep sound and pure and sweet or something that is faulty and not worth storing?
As a child I learned my Bible lessons by heart, in t he good old-fashioned way, and once won the prize for repeating correctly more verses from the Bible than any other person in the Sunday school. But always my mind had a trick of picking a text here and a text there and connecting them together in meaning. In this way there came to me a thought that makes the stores from my invisible harvest important to me. These texts are familiar to everyone. It is their sequence that gives the thought.
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break thru and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do no break thru or steal.” (Matthew 6:19-20)
And then: “Why say ye. Lo here and lo there. Know y e not that the kingdom of Heaven is within you?” (Luke 17:21)
“The Farm Home” (30), by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in The Missouri Ruralist, October 20, 1920
