Pike County,  Eastern Kentucky

On the day Maude was born,    
a quicksilver fog pooled, the sun slow to rise.  
   
Women tended to birthing wounds,    
while coal-sooted men sat around the porch, swapping stories and moonshine.    
   
Growing up, Maude often scrambled to the top of an east-facing hillside, peering crest to crest.  Her daydreams more colorful there.    
   
Maude lost two young brothers to typhoid. Then two sisters to flu. As she grew-up, men  
hovered ‘round her like bees to a blossom.  
   
Maude would become a schoolteacher and marry another, Percy Lee.  Together they envied    
the take-home wages of a single miner.    
   
Maude fashioned candles from tallow and beeswax, lighting them nightly on a table where they planned both lessons and leaving.  
   
Their children, Neva Mae, Ernest Newton, and Robert Lee, came one after the other.  Maude and Percy polished their children like gems.    
   
Their last “ticket” took Maude and Percy Lee to New Lebanon, Ohio, where they taught for  
thirty more years.    
   
In his 60th year Percy Lee was hit by stroke    
which severed him down the middle.    
Maude deciphered the words he mumbled.    
   
Later, when the cancer came for her legs,    
Maude didn’t cry out. As morphine washed over her, she climbed an east-facing hill.    
   
Last breath sliding from her lips, into the  
fog she disappeared.