This May Be the Best Year

"This may be the best year of all if we make it so.  And that is not such a terribly hard stint, either.  It just means that we shall do a few things faithfully, earnestly, honesty, as unto the Lord.  Here are some of those things:

Keep the grass cut out of the path to the meeting-house next summer, and travel that way sometimes when we have not the scythe with us.

Make the schoolhouse one of the brightest, happiest places in all the neighborhood.  It ought to be the place from which everything good and helpful radiates through the community.

Do our farm work not so much with an eye to the money we may make out of it, as that we may make the world better and bring a bit more of cheer to everybody in it.  Plowed ground never bears so fruitfully as when it is sowed by the hand of love.

Give the right hand of fellowship to every man, woman and child we meet.  It isn't so much what men lack of bread and butter that makes them heavy of heart in this world; it is that they need a kindly word, a smile and a hearty "God bless you."

Live every day so that when the horses hear the big barn door slide in the morning they may shout right out, so that they can be heard clear down into the cow stables, and waken an echoing salute in the heart of every living creature there.

Put every bit of self possible into the simplest things we do.  Let the world know we mean it when we drive a nail or pitch a forkful of hay.

So this year may be made radiant, and we live the life glorious."

-- taken from a 1916 Agricultural Almanac that M. received for Christmas, complete with pencil notations of when the farmer who owned the almanac planted his wheat and harvested his corn