I walk these woods
Wild azaleas, ladies slippers and sweet shrub
Bobcats, deer, turkey and bear
Towering pines and hardwoods
A cushion of straw and leaves
Knee-deep in some places.

I remember rabbit hunting here as a child.
Back then, there were still open spaces
Filled with broom sedge, honeysuckle and bare red clay.
Blackberry briars and pine trees no taller than my head
Red Cedars and hollies everywhere for Christmas
We always came and cut our tree here.

It seems an untouched wilderness now
But if you go slow and look closely
You can still see faint reminders of my people

Flat stones stacked three high
The pillars for a barn or house long gone
A stone chimney half fallen
Because bees have stolen the mud chinking.

The outline of the springhouse
Where they kept the milk cool
The hole where later, when they could afford the time
They dug a well by hand.


Rusty barbed wire growing out of the center of huge trees
A reminder of better times
When there was money to buy wire
And enough neighbors that the cattle no longer roamed free

A whisky still by the creek
Dug down into a hole to hide it
The still full of axe holes
Cut by the revenuers
When they finally found it

Irish whisky to grease the fiddle
At the barn dance
To make the feet fly in a merry jig
And to drown the sorrows  
There were plenty of those

The farm next door
Where the husband went out to the barn one day
And hanged himself.

Ditches deeper than a man is tall
Zigzag across the landscape like lightning strikes
Reminders of what they learned
That the rains would wash the top soil down into the creek
Leaving nothing to nourish the crops.

In the end, the government offered assistance
Men with book learning called County Agents
Men who knew how to survey elevations
And design terraces that still curve through the deep woods

It was too little too late
But farming was all they knew
So the farmers spent weeks and months and years
Digging and damming to build
Those little pyramids of salvation
To save their soils

They were poor as the dirt itself.
And now, even the dirt was gone

It was no way to live
Finally they began abandoning the farms.
Slowly at first, then an avalanche
They went to the towns and cities
Assembly line workers
Who didn't mind 12 hour days
Or amputations.

The farms stood there
Little ghost towns on every 50 acres.
Snakes and mice moved into the houses.
The buildings burned or rotted
The storehouse, the smokehouse, the barn, the chicken coop.

These are my people
I walk where they walked
I see what was lost
I cherish what remains