The Highest Peak

It was sundown. Late fall, 1918. I was four years old. Ma was in the kitchen cooking supper and pop was down in the low ground pulling corn. I was always full of curiosity and I loved watching the chickens in the hen house. As I always did, I looked in the hen house and sitting on the roost pole was a buzzard. "Ma, ma, ma! It's a buzzard in the hen house." "Nonsense child, there is no buzzard in the hen house," she said. "Come look," I told her. "Well, if it is, that means good news is on the way and the only good news could be the war is over and the boys are coming home." She started to follow me down the small path to the hen house. Just then I saw Grandpa Nick running up the path calling ma. The path was so sandy he could barely make it and when he finally got to where ma was, he was out of breath. "Amen, amen, amen," he puffed. "The war is over! The war is over!" The events in Virginia Lee's life were unique and she believed that many of the things that happened to her were caused by unexplained phenomena. When you read her memoir, you'll see that she truly saw things differently than other people and you, too, will wonder if what happened to her was just coincidence...or was something else. Virginia's daughter is now telling the story of her mother's life. The result is The Highest Peak, which has been taken from the memoir Virginia Lee started on January 17, 1965 and finished in 1969.