Education by Sidney Lea – The Milk House
Education
… Fortunate Fields—like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
–Wordsworth, The Excursion
I’ve been here for decades among all sorts of hardwoods,
eight evergreen species, innumerable shrubs,
not on the Main. But in truth, I was born in the suburbs.
Or somebody was. What I’ll call imagination
grew up instead at my uncle’s farm:
sheep’s wool hung on branch and bramble like blooms,
commotion of crows in acres of stubbled corn,
cottontails binging on emerald clover,
down by the pond, a pair of Barred Owls in palaver,
the hefty hired man’s cry at dusk as he called
cows to the barn and grain in their troughs,
his blue-eyed collie nipping at their hind hoofs.
Old times, but not so old that as darkness slunk in
the man had to hold his metal lantern.
He didn’t have to hold it but did, God bless him,
a man as quaint back then as I may be now.
Scent of coal oil and cow, and next morning,
the same patient herd of cattle jostling and moaning
as he and the dog shooed them back to the fog-swaddled fields.
Fleecy blossoms. The birds’ rough clamor.
The Galway burr of the foursquare, bull-necked herder.
And something indefinable rooting itself in myself.
I sensed what I felt would in time become a sea
of substance and soul later on when I became me.
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Learn more about Sydney on the Contributors’ page.
Sydney’s latest collection, What Shines, was published by Four Way Books and available here.
(Photo: David Fant/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
The 2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest is now underway!
$500 first prize, $200 runner-up. $10 entry fee. Finalists will be published in the 2026 Best in Rural Writing print anthology.
Accepting fiction and nonfiction under 7,000 words. To enter, click here.
Deadline: September 15th, 2025
The 2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest is sponsored by The Daily Yonder. The Daily Yonder offers news, analysis and stories from Rural America, free for readers to enjoy. Visit dailyyonder.com to get more great rural stories, or sign up to their newsletter to receive rural reporting directly in your inbox. Alternatively, you can listen and subscribe to their podcast, Rural Remix, wherever you get your podcasts.
