Wormridden

1959, Richard Harwood, “East Kentucky’s Mountain—No. 3.—Mountain Areas Make Progress in War on Sickness, Poverty, Dirt,” Louisville Times, 18 February, 1959, cited in U.S. Senate, 86th Congress, Session 1, Area Redevelopment Act. Hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, p. 650, The children inside are wormridden and indescribably filthy.

[…] it has been again and again demonstrated that with a little care and slight expense an Apple orchard can be easily preserved from the attacks of caterpillars. But when a few keep these pests away by the use of simple preventives, their careless neighbors take no precautions and suffer their shade-trees and orchards to be worm-ridden.

The stone is new and white, the plans are penciled upon paper still unspoiled; but the spirit, the idea, the belief, the ideology, in which these buildings are being reared, are old, worm-ridden, petrified.

Through a window he glimpses the Shaws’ back yard: an apple tree dropping wormridden fruit, rampant weeds, an area fenced in with galvanized-iron sheets, wooden pallets, old tyres, where chickens scratch around and what looks uncommonly like a duiker snoozes in a corner.