‘Business-like cold’

Photo by Stephen Hudson

“There has been more talk about the weather around here this year than common, but there has been more weather to talk about. For about a month now we have had solid cold—firm, business-like cold that stalked in and took charge of the countryside as a brisk housewife might take charge of someone else’s kitchen in an emergency.”

— E.B. White, in 1944, writing in his Harper’s Magazine “One Man’s Meat’’ column on life at his coastal Brooklin, Maine, farm.

Life at his “salt-water farm’’ inspired E.B. White to write this classic.