Peck Robert Newton - Weeds in bloom : autobiography of an ordinary man

M Y BOOK IS YOUR A MERICA .

An album of my old friends and your new ones. Real citizens you deserve to greet, and know, and possible remember. You shall know me by the people I have known.

There is no plot.

A happy marriage of Yankee and Confederate, it rambles along Vermont dirt roads and Floridas red clay, meandering like a cow path, seeming at first to go nowhere. But a cow path usual gets to a goala freshet of cool water, a barn at milking time, a puddle of shade beneath a meadow elm.

Or a maple.

On the outside, maple trees are rocky hard in their rough tough bark. Yet inside, a sip of springtime sap is sugar sweet. Also in spring, cow manure spread across a pregnant farming field produces a nourishing fragrance. Part of the unseen overture of birth. New life, not yet up. Brown creating green.

Innards differ from hide. Thats the mission of my manuscript, to show how plain people can sparkle.

Poverty can etch and furrow the faces of the old or smolder in the eyes of the young. Yet hardship is not always yoked with hardness of the heart. Along with rural innocence, many are graced with charm and backwoods wisdom. Horse sense and cow warmth. They are fresh milk, not from a store but from a stanchion, still bubbling, uncooled and unpasteurized. Raw.

They can decipher the moonlit bugle of a blue-tick hound, dig up cure-all ginseng root, and perhaps steep you a natural remedy for miseries that might plague your body, or cloud your mind.

A few still plant by the star signs.

Others may hunt beneath a possum moon. Or tote around a horse chestnut (a buckeye) in a pocket to prevent an ache. They can skin and gut a rabbit without a knife, and mash wild red choke-cherries for a coughing child. Or snip off part of an implanted porcupine quill to let the gas escape from the shaft in order to reduce its size, and then extract the bloody barb from a newly educated Fido.

Some can locate a bee tree and use the melted comb wax to seal a jar of rhubarb conserve. They drip their own jelly. Their cookstoves, cast only in black, burn nothing but gathered wood to raise biscuits that raise children that raise Cain.

Complaints are rare.

Our American poor are proud of who they are and what crafts they can accomplish (such as fashioning a crude collar for a mule), and will willingly share chow or shelter with a stranger. At times their generosity is a widows mite, their smiles braving adversity to spit in its eye. After personally digging a grave with their own shovels to bury a loved one, they grieve privately.

Somehow, as uncanny as this may sound to you, country people sense that I came from a humble home and a mix-blood background. Although many are illiterate, they can heal far more often than they can hurt. In a way, for you, I harvest wild herbs of humanity. Some I have known since boyhood. Worthy of gathering.

All, save one, are American, chapters and verses of our nations past and present. Stars in our flag. Not fancy folk. So please expect no long-stemmed roses from a florist. They are, instead, the unarranged flora that Ive handpicked from Gods greenery.

Weeds in bloom.