Key West The Newspaper

by Kirby Congdon…….

After the natives had built the stone walls for us to designate the legalities of the disorganized map of nature, the gravel tills, the knolls, and the ledges that the glacier had left in the debris of the land with its hills and gullies which the melt-down of centuries had left, we ignored any stone interruptions in the pastures and the farmland we needed. Those were only fun for children to climb or for hanging a swing or on a walk to see the back-water tidal wash on the other side of the village where cargo boats had moored by the stone wharf to deliver the goods of the nineteenth century, all of it needed to establish commerce and the business of the new century after the Civil War, a conflict that still survived for two more centuries in the nation’s economy, its morals, its grief and its need to be, at last, read.

Instead, we got electricity, telephones, plumbing, a lawn mower and a garage for the car. The Mohicans resettled back up there in Legyard building small houses and then the casinos just like our own. Everyone prospered, they said. The poets fled to that big studio, New York City as the old pastures they had known returned once more to woodland or suburban complexes with running water, sewers and a streetlight that worked.

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