Azalea: The Story of a Little Girl in the Blue Ridge Mountains

The guinea hens wanted everybody to get up. They said so right under the bedroom window; and the turkey gobbler had the same wish and made it known in his most important manner. Hours before, Mr. Rhode Island Red, the rooster, had expressed his opinion on the subject, and from the first pale hint of dawn till the sun swung up in the clear May sky, a great company of tanagers, robins, martins, meadow larks and their friends had suggested, each in his own way, that it was time to be awake.

But really, it didn’t need all of this clamor to get the McBirneys out of bed. Since sunup, Thomas McBirney had been planting cotton on the red clay terraces of his mountain farm; and Mary McBirney, his wife, had been busied laying her hearth-fire, getting the breakfast and feeding the crowing, cackling, gobbling creatures in the yard. And three times she had thrust her head in at the door of the lean-to to say that if she were a boy she’d get up and see what a pretty day it was.

James Stuart McBirney, otherwise Jim, thought his mother was right about almost everything, but he did differ with her about getting up when a fellow felt like a log and his eyes were as tight as ticks. He had heard her say there was a time for everything, and it seemed to him that the time to sleep was when a fellow was sleepy. Why should sensible people send him to bed when he wasn’t sleepy and make him get up when he was?

Besides, something kept nagging away in the back of his mind. It was something that he ought to remember, and couldn’t quite, on account of being so sleepy. Or perhaps he didn’t want to remember it. At any rate, it wouldn’t let him rest in comfort, but pecked away like a woodpecker at a tree. So, in spite of himself, it all came back to him. Ma was out of “fat pine” for kindling, and he must go hunting it.