June Homecoming at Cades Cove

And they came, each one close to these stones, aged and chipped little lambs watching nesting places for Cove babies in early June.

Sprigs of still stemmed roses, mums, iris, and daffodils unpacked ceremoniously from their resting tubs, divvied among twenty or so

folks fashioning homecoming decoration for a lost Cove community. We attended blood kin first. With the same attention we adorned

all the names, each rowed up the same today as yesterday and the day they were first dug. Dying stopped in the Cove when Roosevelt

took it. The crying didn’t even now when tourist clothes mingle among our kin’s finest this first Sunday homecoming in June.