The Widow on Shanghai Ridge

I was raised out on Shanghai Ridge
six miles south of town
An' our neighbor-lady was an ol' farmer's widow
who was batshit crazy

An octogenarian she
could remember the first time she saw an automobile
a Model T Ford
An' before people had radios
telephones
or Social Security numbers
She could remember meeting Civil War veterans
Her arthritic hands gnarled like sycamore roots in a riverbank
She burned her trash in a fifty-gallon drum
Wild turkeys ventured into her yard in January
to eat birdseed out of a rusted bread pan

She sat up in her house all alone
winding her clocks
jest thinkin' an' a-worryin'
about how somebody was gonna steal her antiques
Which she had a house full of
An' which was utterly ridiculous since most of the neighbors
left their keys in the car an' never locked the house

She had a big barn with ax-marks on the beams
from where they were hewed out of trees by sweaty long-ago men
It was full of dead equipment an' old tractors on flat tires
Seized tobacco-setters
orphaned Farmalls
an' derelict manure spreaders
Somehow she was convinced somebody was gonna drive away with 'em

The ghosts of generations of cattle roamed her overgrown pastures
an' trampled her collapsing fence lines
Her corn crib was full of browned corncobs an' dust
She used to give me Depression-glass mason jars
feed me gooseberries an' rhubarb pie
an' tell me all about just how much she hated all of her relatives
who had mostly been dead for years

She told me how Shanghai Ridge got its name
on account of they used to fight Shanghai roosters there
Having herself learned that story from an old man when she moved in
back in in 1964
before the road was paved or there was electric service
Now she's dead an' gone
and there is nobody left who knows the ridge's name

Like the Shawnee before us