Still, I resented being stung. But it was not even the sting that I resented. Klinkenborg's dispatches on 'the rural life,' which grace, from time to time, the editorial page of The New York Times , are not just masterful in composition and magical in eloquence, they seem to capture what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called inscape and instress - the essential quality of a thing, and the energy that sustains it. One moment there is no wind, the air still and damp. The next moment the wind is turning corners where there are none, lifting and coiling the barnyard dust.
Wind flails the leaves on the sugar maples, revealing their silver undersides.
It scatters spent hickory flowers in drifts. The sky blackens, and I can almost hear rain begin. But then the wind drops and the front unravels over the western ridge, where the weather comes from. Blue sky intervenes. A clear night threatens once again, Venus hanging peaceful in the dusk.