72 animal, vegetable, miraclesymmetrically spaced trunks, and on warm April days when the trees are
in bloom, it’s an almost unbearably romantic place for a picnic. As the
white petals rain down like weightless, balmy snow, Lily dances in circles
and says things like, “Quick, somebody needs to have a wedding!” I re-
cently called the Stark’s Nursery company in Missouri to let them know
an orchard of their seventy- fi ve- year- old antique apple varieties still stood
and bore in Virginia. They were fairly enthused to hear it.
Nearly every corner of this farm, in Webb family lore, has a name at-
tached to it, or a story, or both. There is Pear Orchard Hill, Dewberry Hill,
the Milk Gap, where the cows used to cross the road coming home to the
barn. We still call it the Milk Gap, though no cows use it now. A farm has
its practical geography; when you tell someone to go close the gate, she
needs to know whether you mean the Milk Gap gate or the barn lot gate.
We have the Garden Road, the Woods Road, the Paw- Paw Cemetery, and
the New Orchard. And once a year, for a few days, we have a spot that
rises from obscurity to prominence: Old Charley’s Lot.
Old Charley was a billy goat that belonged to the Webbs some seventy
years ago. In the customary manner of billy goats, he stank. For that rea-
son they kept him penned on a hillside nearly half a mile up the hollow
from the house: that was Old Charley’s lot, figuratively and literally. Most
of the time now it’s just a steep, unvisited place on the back side of our
farm, but for one week of the year (for reasons unrelated to the goat, as far
as we know), it’s the pot of gold at the end of our rainbow. What grows
there sells for upward of twenty dollars a pound in city markets: the most
prized delicacy that ever comes to our table.
/The mountainsides of our farm stand thickly wooded with poplar,
beech, and oak. Two generations ago they were clear pastures, grazed by
livestock or plowed for crops. This used to be a tobacco farm. It aston-
ishes us when our neighbors look at our tall woods and say: “That’s where
we grew our corn. Our tobacco patch was on top, for the better sun.”
Such steep hillsides were worked with mules and a lot of hand labor (a
tractor would roll like a boulder), which is exactly why so much of the
farmland around here has now grown up into medium- sized stands of