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Village Squire, 1977-10, Page 23Years ago, when I was a boy, there was a field on our farm we called the hidden meadow. That was long ago, before the times changed. and now that I am old I remember it and the old world as if they were a dream. Even then the meadow was like a dream. Maybe that's the best part of this story, that the hidden meadow was and always will be a dream, that the change of the outer world could never touch or tarnish. Dreams can't be changed anyway, they get to be like bread and water and blood, that you can't do without and that you can't change anymore than you can change your real and secret name. Now outside this hospital window I can see the people passing on the street, the people who gained by all the changes I've seen in my life. So it's said. I was born in the time of the automobile and I'll go out in the time of the pedestrian. Bit of a change. But this street's cleaner than years ago, no cars on the street but flower beds growing over there. That's what reminded me of the hidden meadow I guess, the golden rod that crept in there among all those tame flowers, or maybe it was the yellow snapdragons made me think of it, they look so much like the butter -and -eggs that used to grow by the ditch across the field. I am getting old, when things like that get turning around in my mind and I can't think what I'm thinking of that got me into this mind of old dreams and remembering that meadow. Pretty sort of street from here. Probably looks different facing this hospital for the old and ill. But from over here the street looks fine. All those skinny houses squeezed in like people coming home from work on the city car. they do fine for something to watch all day. In the old days we would have been watching television but there isn't such a thing anymore. That makes me wonder if that's why they made that old T.V. in the first place, to give old folks some watching to do, which is in their line after all. That's too bad if there was ever a time when there was no watching of grandchildren or pots on the stove to do so they invented that old T.V. to keep old people content. Anyway from over here at these windows we watch those houses. which is a fine occupation since the street keeps quite busy. and those of us who find ourselves here instead of at home watching our old wives or worlds that we come from, we do need something to watch, even if we're dying, which is something they don't tell you anyway. That puts me in mind of the hidden meadow again. That was back at home in the township when I was growing up. I guess more important. it was back then, before times changed. I'm still from there now. 1 came here from that farm house where Ida my wife is still waiting. watching for me to come home. So what I think is this, that I'm not looking back on a lost place when I remember that old meadow, though the meadow is gone. But it's the dream I'm thinking of. like a truth that has remained. though the meadow is gone which was its emblem. I was just a boy when I discovered the hidden meadow, the youngest of five brothers. My dad had a big farm, close on four hundred acres. The lane went down through the fields with the prettiest flowering crab apple trees on both sides, and here and there some tame forsythia crept in, just the way that golden rod crept in between those pansies and petunias. The pastures had lots of cow pies and daisies growing in the green grass, and blue salt blocks poking out here and there on a stick. The fields were gold with wheat, yellow with oats or brown in the fall with dying corn. All that's the same still. Crops don't change, however you grow them. any more than dreams of fine harvests will never change. Though they grow the food for people now. There are few hog barns left in the township. More cows I think. We used to go on rambles then, the six of us, I trotting behind in short pants with my next brother's handed down boots clopping around my legs. When chores were done on a Saturday that was clear and warm like today in just the right way we'd go for one of our hikes, wandering down the lane through the fields to the bush. We called it the bush though even then it was no wilderness. It was just a ten acre stand of trees at the back of the farm. Everybody in those days had a woodlot on their land. Most farmers wanted to be able to busy themselves in the winter, taking a few hundred dollars worth of lumber out of the bush. dragging the logs out with a giant tractor that almost anyone THE CASUAL ELEGANCE OF THE BIG, BOLD, BULKY COWL NECK PULLOVER. CHOOSE FROM A GREAT SELECTION IN ANY COLOUR YOU REQUIRE. VILLAGE SQUIRE/OCTOBER 1977, 21.