Page 19 - WTP Vol. IX #6

Pennsylvania to Georgia.
East Coast earthquakes are not as frequent as on the West Coast, but when they do occur, the effects are felt across a broader area. One of those caused a landslide that created the Gulch and the bluff above it. The morning glories were courtesy of Old Man Kelsey’s great-grandmother. She loved them, those delicate twining plants with their showy, trumpet- shaped flowers. They came in all shades—red, white, purple, yellow—even robin’s-egg blue. After that earthquake Nettie Kelsey doggedly scattered morning glory seeds across the bare escarpment of the newly formed bluff. Morning glories prefer sun during the day, and the blank face of the bluff amply provided it. On the day I sickled my way through the jungle to its very edge, I thought it’d been snowing. But it was only a patch of white morning glories, reflecting the sun.
After the morning glories were firmly established, Old Man Kelsey’s father built a home in the center
of the Gulch, sheltered from the north wind by the morning glory wall. Sensing that it might be a good location, he converted the ground floor of that house into a store, to sell dry goods, hardware, notions, and whatnot, gradually leaving the farming to his son. Gasoline pumps were added later, as the state of Virginia, like the rest of America, turned from horseless carriages to Fords, Chevrolets, and pickup trucks.
On the wall in the Handi-Foods store, just inside the door with its set of tinkling bells, was a framed needlepoint sampler that Nettie Kelsey had made. I suppose it’s still there. I’ll have to check—when I get the courage to drive into Morning Glory Gulch and drop in for a reminiscent Popsicle. Around the edges of that sampler, the muslin fabric was embroidered with a colorful array of morning glories. The framed text looked like calligraphy:
The morning glory is a flower of duality. It blooms and dies in a single day. In Chinese folklore it represents a single day for lovers to meet. To Victorians it symbolizes mortality.
Excerpted from Anatomy of Circumstance, a novel.
Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, Smith is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of three others. His own work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. He holds a DA from Carnegie-Mellon, an MFA in Fiction from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, an MAT from Yale, and a BA from Wesleyan. He and his wife live in Madison, WI.
"T
echo around the Gulch long after one of those pigs dropped like a rag."
he report of Kelsey’s
rifle continued to
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