Azalea's Silver Web

by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

But I confess that I knew that Annie Laurie had written to Keefe’s sister, Mrs. Rowantree, all about it, and that I was morally sure she would write to Keefe. But that, as you will plainly see, was something over which I had no control. Not, I will confess, that I tried to have.

Meantime, I tried to be content, and I was, really, but it was a contentment made up largely of expectation. You see how frank I am with you. Do you mind? It is Azalea’s way. You don’t want her to try to be any other way than is natural to her, do you?

Yes, I had a beautiful, deep-down, reassuring sense of expectation. I felt as if Happiness was journeying toward me.

“Maybe,” I often said to myself, “she will be a long while coming, but she is on the way. By putting my ear to the ground, I am sure I can hear her footsteps.”

So I kept on working and working, and the work thrived and I thrived. At night I slept the sleep of the very weary, and all day long I was playing the fine exciting game of building up the business of the Mountain Industries.

Then, when I had nothing else to do, I dreamed dreams.

There was only one thing in the world that bothered me, and that was the little house up on the mountain. It seemed too outrageous that anybody—a stranger at that—should have come down into the Blue Ridge and bought and built on the one spot of all the whole range that I had selected for myself. To add insult to injury, he was putting up precisely, identically, the sort of a house that I had designed for the place. There was only one way to account for that, and that was that both he and I had selected the most appropriate sort of a house for the place. Such a house, I finally decided, must be inevitable in such a spot. And yet, after all, that didn’t quite account for the strangeness of the fact that the place was such a materialization of my dream. It really annoyed me. I did not like that man. I was prepared to be disagreeable to him.

And then, one day, I saw him.

It was a Sunday, clear and crisp and cold, and I had been up to have dinner with Mother McBirney. Jim was home, too, for the holidays, and the four of us sat in the quaint, dear old room just as we used years ago. Only now it was Jim and not Father McBirney who said grace at table. It was he who carved the turkey too. For it was a feast, and we ate one of the turkeys which usually are kept for market. But nothing is too good for Jim, home from college. Or for Azalea, who is keeping him there.

Yes, turkey we had, and yams cooked in sugar and wild crab apple jelly and green tomato pickles and molasses bread and biscuits and gravy, and coffee and “stickies” for dessert. To make stickies, you make a pie crust and roll brown sugar in it. You are always glad when you see them and sorry after you have eaten them. Ma makes the best ones in the South. Oh, yes, we were very happy. The fire leaped in the old black fireplace, and the hounds curled up before it and whined with joy. Ma was a dream in her blue dress and white apron with her dear face shining with goodness and love, and Pa McBirney was a picture with his whitening hair. Outside the mountain dreamed and dreamed, and told us how long mountains lived, and what a little while mere folks had for enjoying themselves, and warned us to gather up all the sweetness we could while we have a chance.