by Clarence Wolfshohl
The
first spring we lived in our house, I stumbled upon the sassafras
trail. I was clearing brush from around the house, which we had
built in the midst of our nine-acre wood, saving what wood I could
for the coming winter’s fireplace. A pile of logs and cut brush
ran across the streamlet alongside the house, gathered there by the
previous owners. They had cleared only a small area before they were
transferred and sold us the mostly white oak and hickory woods. As I
chainsawed the logs into fireplace lengths, the air suddenly exploded
with the odor of sassafras. One of the logs was of a sassafras tree.
Two
images immediately appeared in mind. One was a dollar’s sign.
Back when we lived in West Virginia,
it had cost us a small fortune (at least, for us) to have one of
Patricia’s teeth capped when she broke it on a piece of sassafras
candy. The other was a page I had seen recently in the Norton
Anthology of British Literature,
a page containing a poem by Michael Drayton, a contemporary of
Shakespeare, entitled “Ode: To the Virginia Voyage.” Not being
an Elizabethan scholar, I had never read the poem before but found it
as I was browsing through the anthology on an idle, rainy Sunday.
The poem was in celebration of an expedition to Virginia that set off
from England in December 1606. Drayton had published the poem before
the three ships left and had anticipated the fortune to be found.
Among the treasures of pearl and gold; fowl, venison and fish;
fruitful soil; and “earth’s only paradise,” were
The
cypress, pine,
And
useful sassafras.
http://morecontinued.blogspot.com/2015/08/continued-sassafras-fortune.html
Clarence Wolfshohl is
professor emeritus of English at William Woods University. He has
published both creative and scholarly writing in small press and
academic journals. He is a member of AAPA and operates El Grito del
Lobo Press. A native Texan, Wolfshohl now lives with his writing, two
dogs and one cat in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri.
A nice read, Clarence. Thank You. --Dave
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