Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill Page A

knoll of his part of Old Tom's farm. Forty or fifty big American chestnut trees stood there together, as the old men had saved them from the first clearings back in Indian times, and for generations they had been the neighborhood nutting ground. On crisp autumn days, the hilltop would be full of chestnut pickers scattering the yellow leaves with their sticks and picking up the sweet, brown, silver-tailed nuts. As we moved along under the trees, the leaves rustled, the bluejays cawed, and the sweet smell of autumn dust rose around us. When we stopped to listen, we could hear the squirrels chattering up inthe branches and the chestnuts falling like slow rain.
    When Uncle Dan'l sold his orchard to the lumber company, the lumberjacks came in and cut it down, and then our four trees over on the home place cankered and died. In a few years, gray ghosts of the chestnut trees stood against the skyline, their bark all sloughed off. All across the mountains their bare arms reached up to the sky, and down below the new road came and began to tie our Swago Farm to the world.

    When the new road was finished, it was hard, smooth, and gray-colored, and the Model T's came chugging along it, and the fancy Chevrolets, Maxwells, and Jewetts. When you went in by horse or foot, you could live almost anywhere, and the whole Swago mountain country had been scattered with wilderness farms, houses, and old one-room schools. But after the road was finished, new houses and new schoolhouses were built alongside it, and then the barns came down too. Then the gas stations came, and the little Dew Drop Inns. Back in the hills, the old houses and schoolhouses rotted down, blackberry vines crept over the broken porches, and the eyeless windows stared out at the encroaching wilderness.
    Once G.D. got his own Model T, he had so much trouble getting it in through the swamp muck and the drifted snow that we too built our new house and moved over to the road. G.D. carried part of the old house with us: Captain Jim's two stone chimneys and his black walnut fireboard. After we moved and had clean running water and French doors and a breakfast nook, G.D. never went back to the old house that still stood under the hill and had been turned into a hay barn. It was almost as though Granny Fanny had jerked her thorn broom handle out of the world's axis and the whole contraption began to rattle and whirl. We three older kids began going off to college, and I began to publish poems and went dancing with Louis Untermeyer.
    G.D. and Mama had planned to support all four of us children through at least two years of college, and then to let us make our own way by teaching school, saving our money, and going to summer terms. Ward and Elizabeth went first, and then I went with Elizabeth to the university as a freshman when I was sixteen years old. I had one year there, but I spent so much money that G.D. jerked me out as soon as I had a certificate and let me make my own way from there on in.
    Sometime in the fall of my sixteenth year, I composed my first poem, working on a borrowed typewriter in my dormitory room. Though I had no boyfriend, it was a poem of love and passion: “When scarlet clouds fly by the moon, I'm always in my memories with you.” I read the poem to myself and something happened to me. I had felt such joy in the writing itself and in the rhythms of the lines that I swore a vow that I would be a poet and write poems forever.
    Soon after, in one of the old soon-to-be-abandoned schoolhouses, I taught my first school. It was the winter of 1930, just before the yellow school buses started running. We always called it the School up in the Brush Country, but its official name was Pleasant Hill. The schoolhouse stood on an eroded hilltop and had two decaying privies hidden out in the brush. I walked in three and a half miles each way, or boarded around with the families and walked with the Wilfong children up Ress Wilfong's hollow to the schoolhouse