There was one quality which Father possessed to a marked degree and which I always envied him, a thing small in itself, yet which enabled him to accomplish what he did in literature, and that was the ability to lay aside the business or cares of life, as one would hang up one's hat, absolutely and completely, and turn to his writing. The world will think of him as a poet naturalist, as a gentle sage and philosopher, when he was in truth a literary craftsman, and one who could never give but a portion of his time and effort to his life's work until he was sixty years of age. I first remember him as a bank examiner. I remember his going away for trips to examine banks, of his packing his valise and putting on a white or "boiled" shirt, the gold cuff buttons, his combing his beard, the wonder and mystery of it all. Then he became a "mugwump" and the new party gave his bank-examining to someone else; and, as he expressed it, "I had to stir my stumps," and he took up the raising of fine grapes.
Just as his boyhood had the cow for its centre of interest, mine had the Delaware grape. And Father made a success of his vineyards. I can see him now summer pruning, he on one side of the row, I on the other, "pulling down" as we called the summer pruning, or he was stamping lids or tying up bundles of baskets. Many of the lids had sawdust on them which had to be blown or brushed off before they could be stamped. Father acquired the habit of blowing, and he got so used to it that he would blow anyway, whether or not the lid needed it; if it did not he would blow straight ahead and I would laugh at him for it, and he would raise his eyebrows and half smile, meaning, that it was something he could indulge himself in. He once wrote of his grandson:
"I had the rare good fortune to be born in the country upon a farm and to share in the duties and responsibilities of farm life. My poor grandson John is not so lucky in this respect and he has not had to pick up potatoes and stone and gather apples and husk corn and hoe corn and spread and rake hay and drive the cows and hunt up the sheep in the mountain and spread manure and weed the garden and clean the cow stables, and so on, and go two miles through snow-choked fields and woods to school in winter and have few books to read and see no illustrated papers or magazines. John has the movies by night and his bicycle by day and a graded school to attend and a hundred aids and spurs where I had none. My fate was better than John's and I can but hope he has advantages that I did not have that may offset the advantages I had."