Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 23, 1992 TAG: 9202230066
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TRASHY TALE CHILLS TO THE BONE
Because competition ran late last night, today's column doesn't report the results of Roanoker Robert Hager's quest to become the world jalapeno pepper-eating champion. Look for the results in Monday's paper.\ The wind is rattling the windows in their tracks, raising eddies of cold ash in the dark hearth and flicking the candle flames about their wicks.
There comes a knock at the door - so late on such a chilly night! - but who could that be at this hour?
Crack the door ever so slightly to guard against the wintry snaps. Why, there seems to be no one here. Could it have been just a tree branch? A string in the cellar, dried, breaking beneath the weight of the potatoes hung there, dropping its load onto the dirt floor? Or mere imagination?
One more check. Wrap the blanket tight about the shoulders and open the door again, a bit wider this time. No, no sign of anyone, ease the door shut - but there! There - a gurgle, the muffled sound of a human voice.
Look down.
On the front step, on the unswept snow, is a basket, covered by a thick woolen shawl. A pair of footsteps recedes through the snow, disappearing into the dark. The gurgle.
Pull the woven basket inside, cautiously, and shut the door. Someone
has left a baby, red-cheeked, on our step!
Quickly, now, strike a fire. The child must be chilled clear to the marrow!
\ That's folklore, right? Legend. Heart-wrenching, then -warming, tale of the waif taken in and reared with love by parents' anointed that long-ago mid-winter evening.
It has happened now at my home, to me. Almost.
\ The wind starts in Nevada, hardly enough to rustle a gum wrapper in a parking lot, but it gains momentum crossing Utah, and Colorado. In Kansas, it's enough to power the windmills over top of the calf barns, and by Missouri it's humping across the continent. Over Kentucky it whistles; and the West Virginia mountains make it angrier still.
By the time the wind hits Roanoke in winter, it's fierce and ill-tempered, tattering the plastic sheets stapled over the windows.
It was one of those nights, the wind from Nevada chiseling at the front of the house, that the thumping out back got so loud. It would start and last a moment or so, and stop. And start. And stop.
It was too cold to go out then and investigate, best to let this front push through and the wind retire to the ocean and die there. Then we could check.
All night long, the thumping.
The sun rose over the Roanoke Valley's stillness the following day. The wind was gone to sea.
There were newspaper inserts in the bushes out front. In the back, where the thumping had been, there were no immediate signs. No trees down. No dinosaur prints.
But there. There, in the alley.
A black garbage can, 33-gallon-sort, lay on its side.
It wasn't our can. Ours are galvanized steel, rotted through on the bottom, the lids long since run over by trash trucks.
Where it came from that windy night a month ago we don't know. No one has claimed it. We have taken the waif can into our hearts and are rearing it with love.