High Summer, and: The Vow

HIGH SUMMER Tobacco's cut and ready for hanging. The creek trickles slowly. Trees are full and heavy-green. Occasionally a single leaf drifts down to nest in thick dry grass. Cicadas thrum viola wings and mists roll into hollows early and linger late. Goldenrod and purple ironweed are man-tall in the meadows and whippoorwills call plaintively for an early dusk. It is high summer— poised for the slide into autumn. Fifty is high summer. —Barbara Mabry THE VOW On this blue-sky day I have vowed never to forgive him for plowing up the daffodils around the old house-site (in the lower meadow down where the two little creeks come together) to make himself a new tobacco bed. —Barbara Mabry 9 ...