Michael Malone - Weebly

Blossom, the successor to Miss Gladys Goff, who had
finally died, to most people's relief, seven years ago.
Mr. Blossom, in his early thirties, always pretended not
to notice that off in a corner of the second floor
adolescents were reading Henry Miller's works and
other books that the sour Miss Goff had banned in the
old days when she had tyrannized over the literary
habits of Dingley Falls. Now he turned from Mrs.
Canopy and welcomed the girls with a wink. Polly liked
Mr. Blossom, who told her stories of the great
rebellions of the sixties, and he liked her.
Driving home from Litchfield, where he had
retrieved from a bridal shower his fiancée (the impishly
christened Emerald Ransom), Arthur Abernathy,
Winslow's son and partner, slowed down for Wild Oat
Ridge. He was happily ignorant of the fact that five
hundred yards away his mother, Beanie, lay under an
oak tree with an obscene poet.
Beatrice and Richard had been wandering, lost,
through Birch Forest for more than an hour. Now they
rested beneath the oak to eat the rest of the Thespian