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The Hundredth Summer of the Chestnut Blight I lug the laundry in and wash my hands of zinc oxide and DEET. Our crows drop dead, the West Nile washing them out of the sky. Snakeheads cross the Potomac, crawl on land amphibiously southward. In July 1904 the chestnut blight broke out of the Bronx Zoo. Like some new worm, it spread beneath the bark; it rained across the high ridge cabins (chestnut shingles, chestnut spouts); it starved the shoats, and bears, and gatherers who, forced into the cities they had fed, took sick like trees. And so my grandmother’s clothesline was hung in coal soot, her whites gray, her rooster like a rusty hinge all day. 11 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 11 ...

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