On this, the shortest day of the year, I'll ask you to take a minute to go back in time a bit. If you don't have a few minutes right now, then please put this aside until you do.

Let us go back a Century and a Decade. Not much electricity around yet, so there is no light scatter. Roads are hand shoveled and then rolled for good sleighing and sledding. There are no rubber tires, pavement, internal combustion engines or motors and so the world is quiet. Very quiet. Our sleigh runners are quiet on the snow so we must have brass harness bells so that folks on foot can hear us coming. And here at Arrowhead, sleigh and sled travel is the only possibility, as is the case in all of rural Essex County.

Climate change to the warm side is not as pronounced yet, and December is a frozen world North of Boston.... And so we have our setting.

As many of you readers know, your correspondent from the Farm is a Student of Robert Frost. And although I have said this in the past with no follow-through, I promise you a reason for my love of Frost after the New Year.

In order to understand Robert Frost, one needs an understanding of the Yankee culture of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Many people today interpret today's Poem as one of Frost's most desperate bouts with depression and that in the last two lines he has contemplated suicide. But we know better, as Frost, himself, has told us exactly the opposite.

So, read this Poem with the pleasures of the season in mind. First let us read "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening." And then we can link to a film of Frost putting voice to his own Poem.

Tomorrow, the days will begin to lengthen. Be of good Cheer.

Dick Chase

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound's the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.