The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction [in our lives] is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove "drudgery" from our lives. If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people, it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is "drudgery" and not worth doing. . . .

That [harvest] can be drudgery is obvious. . . . But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery. None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear. Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.

The [harvest] is the most protracted social occasion of our year. Neighbors work together . . . There is much talk. . . There is much laughter . . . And there are memories.

The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back. . . As we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields remembered. . . . Old stories are retold; the dead and the aabsent are remembered. . . . Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers. How long it may continue is an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know. We only know that while it last it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.

On many days we have had somebody's child or somebody's children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children . . . [But] the small scale and handwork of our [harvest accomodates their play]. In their play, the children learn to work; they learn their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.