The winter starts straight after All Saints’ Day. That’s the way here; the autumn takes away all her Tools and toys, shakes off the leaves—they won’t be needed anymore—sweeps them under the field boundary, and strips the colors from the grass until it goes dull and gray. Then everything becomes black against white: snow falls on the plowed fields. “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,” I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went?
