Free Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill

/ When will all come hone?” Or we made beautiful cornstalk canoes, or clay pipes from the blue rock we found cropping out along the ledge. In spring we would make willow whistles from the willow withes. We slipped the bark and cut holes in the sides so they could whistle their April tunes.
    We played Buckeyes with the nuts of the buckeye tree, a scrubby type of horse chestnut.Because of their coloring and general fat slickness, buckeyes made perfect white-faced cattle. We removed them from their husks, polished them to a shining glow, and gathered them into “herds” on the great limestone rocks. Sometimes I played at driving my buckeye cattle in a great lowing herd to the Indian battle down at Point Pleasant; or, like Captain Jim, to market over at Staunton, Virginia, across Bull Pasture Mountain. My fat herd would wind along the leafy forest roads, and I would be behind them on my high-headed black stallion, winding through the autumn shadows until we disappeared forever into the trees.
    We skipped rocks, hurled apples from long green withes, rolled rocks down the hillside—careful not to kill a cow—or twisted groundhogs out of their holes with a forked stick. We played a more dangerous game with Auldridge's old roany bull. He was on one side of a leaning rusty wire fence; we, on the other. We would put our fists through the wire and push him in the head to make him mad. We were so close I could smell his breath and see the curly hair on his forehead, the little black flies crawling in the corners of his rheumy eyes. We dared each other to taunt him until he got mad, backed up, and began to paw the ground. We took off then, but I can still see his red eye-cornerswith the black flies crawling in them, like the He-Beast, the Minotaur out of my grade school reader, who lived in the Cretan Labyrinth and ate the seven youths and seven maidens every year.
    Often as we grew older, Ward and his best friend Jess would go off fishing or setting “cat” hooks, and Elizabeth and I would play “playhouse” up on the rock cliffs. We gathered armfuls of green moss and spread it for rugs on our floors. We made little chairs and sofas of rocks and spread these. Then we would serve tea in acorn cups and saucers, talk “lady talk,” and wear decorated hats. Elizabeth was the town “milliner,” and we would gather a big weed leaf that grew nearby, called hatweed, about as big as a rhubarb leaf and about that droopy shape. Elizabeth would fasten the hat leaves together in the back with a sharp thorn and decorate them with hillside flowers, the ones her “customers” used for money: oxeye daisies, black-eyed Susans, wild roses, and pink milkweed bloom.

    In late summer, when the long, delicate green milkweed pods were full, we would strip off the outer pods and carefully take out the silky white insides. These were our “milkweed ladies,” as pure and delicate as soft white dove-birds, there on our rock cliff in the sun. We would invite them to“tea,” a crowded three of them sitting so ladylike on our moss sofa; and we, in our millinery hats, serving them. We would tell them in high-pitched Southern voices, about the Ladies' Aid meetings and the strawberry festival down at the church; and one day I made up a rhyme:
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    Milkweed ladies so fair and fine,
    Won't you have a sip of my columbine?
    Or a thimble of thimbleberry wine?
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    As we talked and laughed, the golden finches that frequented the thickets flashed back and forth, and their gold and black wings caught the slants of sun.
    Sometimes Mama came up to our “house” and visited us, and we would show her our flower hats. When Mama was a girl, she had dreamed of being a milliner, sitting in a fine shop somewhere and sewing flowers on beautiful ruffled hats. Sometimes now, I can still see her standing there on the hillside with a wild pink rose in her hand. To her, through all life's tragedies and