Mother in Mannville

I wanted mountain air to blow out the malaria from too long a time in the subtropics.

I suppose an hour and a half passed, for when I stopped and stretched, and heard the boy's steps on the cabin stoop, the sun was dropping behind the far­ thest mountain, and the valleys were purple with something deeper than the asters.

The rhododendron was in bloom, 3 a carpet of color, across the mountainsides, soft as the May winds that stirred the hemlocks.

Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schu te, frm When the Whippoorwill by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.©

I was homesick, too, for the flaming of maples in October, and for corn shocks and pumpkins and black-walnut trees and the lift of hills.

Sometimes in 1 winter the snowdrifts are so deep that the institution is cut off from the village below, from all the world.

Granted, perhaps, that the boy felt no lack, what blood fed the bowels of a woman who did not yearn over this child's lean body that had come in parturition out of her own?

A boy stood at the door, and my pointer dog, my companion, was at his side and had not barked to warn me.

And it seemed to me that being with my dog, and caring for him, had brought the boy and me, too, together, so that he felt that he belonged to me as well as to the ani­ mal.

The rhododendron was in bloom, 3 a carpet of color, across the mountainsides, soft as the May winds that stirred the hemlocks.

The human mind scatters its interests as though made of thistle- 71 down, and every wind stirs and moves it.

I was homesick, too, for the flaming of maples in October, and for corn shocks and pumpkins and black-walnut trees and the lift of hills.

After that, he waited always until my type­ writer had been some time quiet.