Mountains *War Talk* *Mommy* *Chink and Daub*
*Christmas Memories* *Comforting Waves of Heat*
Kitchen Blessings/Heat and Snakes/Making Do, No iPads Needed/One Day of Memory/The Mountains Never Leave Me/Breathing Zero/Oak Island/Tommy Toes/Grace & 66 Books/ Old Woman/At the Cabin / Heat / April … Sweet and Joyous /Maul and Froe/Sharon's Granny/ My Dad, My Mountains, and Me
Mommy
We didn’t expect that we’d both be sitting and crying, our hands grimy with the dust of many old, fading papers.
We only expected, my mother and I, that we would be house cleaning – maybe a little changing around of certain furniture.
I had gone on a couple of vacation days to visit her. It was at a time when I had begun to feel a sense of urgency about spending more time with her, as though the minutes count, not to mention days and weeks.
I was at that time thinking of all she had gone through in the 25 years since the death of her husband and my father. I marveled at her strength and enthusiasm at age 78. (Last fall she planted an acorn and this year she showed her happy little oak to all.)
Not willing to just sit, Mom and I began to clean, taking down her scores of little knick-knacks to dust and rearrange. As we did that she remembered all the sweet stories attached to her treasures.
I started to dust a small, black tin box. On its top the painted swoop of a peacock’s feathers spread in a half-circle. I had never heard this story and didn’t recall what had been inside.
“I got that as a premium when I was selling catalogue products when I was a teenager,” she said. “It was filled with chocolate candy. I was dating your Daddy and when the candy came in the mail I saved it until I saw him again so we could eat it together.”
They were married in 1927, so it had to be earlier that that: she had saved that little box all that time. I could imagine the setting for the two of them I remembered the soft swish of the swing on her parents back porch, the gentle trickle of Poll’s Creek and the huge maple that seemed to joust with the mountains for strength and size.
Settled on bottomland, it seemed to me, her parents’ home was cuddled on both sides by the towering slopes; protecting the families from the rest of the world. I still feel that way about those Appalachian hills.
There in those mountains my mother and father were married and he constructed a stone house halfway up a mountain too far up for floods to reach. As their children came and got old enough they delighted in visits to their grandparents’ long porches and good eats.
We filed away inside ourselves of so many memories from a little tin box. We continued our cleaning, find and ancient suitcase under a bed. Inside a scrapbook filled with yellowed pages held a mix of hand written notebook sheets, newspaper clippings, old photos and certificates.
“Look at this,” she said, holding up a mall square of paper on which my Dad’s name and his designation as a leader of a Victory Garden section was noted. It was dated 1941. “Remember how we couldn’t get sugar because of the rationing during the war?” she asked.
Another certificate commended her on her completion of correspondence courses; other pages held a poem she wrote after the death of a son. There we sat, Mom and I, in all our dirty-fingered, dusty, house-cleaning glory, crying over some little scraps of paper.
Still, it was not exactly sad weeping, it was a tender time of sharing that I shall all as, Mommy said so many times, the minutes that counts.
War Talk
I’m scared of all the war talk. Please, let us keep our Americanism upfront until we look back a bit.
We’ve seen and heard, read and cried over too many of the horrible descriptions of loss, injury, and oh Lord, death. I’ve not made a long-term history study of them all, but I’ve spent about eight or nine decades on this planet; and that time has wrapped around so much information and no age could I file it away and forget it.
I was only going into my teens as our country trembled through World War II. As residents of the Appalachian area, our family knew almost everyone in our area, so the first casualty that shocked my soul was a neighborhood young man who returned from his war stint with one of his arms swinging lifelessly from his shoulder. He couldn’t work. A job was out of the question. Such scenes filled our world as the war went on. I remember my mother saying to me: “Honey, I can’t make fudge right now, we can’t get sugar. It’s rationed.
That, saving scrap iron, watching men of draft age leave our beloved mountains by the dozens.
Meantime, I got older and time came when I was working as a newspaper writer, which helped with my wartime education. As I moved about Butler County Ohio and suddenly my husband John, was drafted, the youngest son in his family to be drafted. The Army sent him to Japan for his time in the military.
Of course, conflicts swept mover our lives like swarms of bees, always altering the ways we lived. One thing that shook our family was when I had to leave my job and take our family back to the mountains to live with my parents.
After the war we returned to a home here in Ohio and my assignments took me through many more war stories: from a World War I widow who had kept a small drum her husband had carried with him that long ago war, stored in her closet.
I was offered a story about a WWII veteran who was spending his final days with a daughter. His daughter told me he had never wanted to talk about his WWII experiences until that present time -- However when he tried to describe his arrival at a war prison camp, he began to cry and couldn’t talk.
One of my cousins became a prisoner of war in Germany, but he survived, but one of his son was sent to the Vietnam War and did not survive. I could continue this but I can’t.
I have never felt so worried about our beloved country as I do now. All I can think of is to pray.
Chink and Daub
Recently I was reading a background piece featuring a woman I met many years ago, when I learned she was from Buckhorn, Kentucky. “Well,” I thought to myself, “I’ve been there. It’s beautiful. It was June and the mountains, fresh with new green, softened the outlines as many different shades of greens on the sloped mountains lifted the scene skyward.”
I don’t know why an old story rose into my mind, but it did, cool and clear.
I saw her eyes turn serious: “My Dad,” she said, “Was the last person around here who knew how to chink and daub.” She seemed upset, she didn’t like it that publicity never noted the expertise of residents who knew about and could build “anything at all.”
I grew up not far from there and knew first-hand how cleverly people of those hills could invent and construct whatever they needed. Sufficient work was unavailable to the people of that area who often made trips to other regions looking for a job.
However, I couldn’t recall the meaning of “chink and daub,” until she explained how when log structures began getting old the “cement or mud or whatever was used to weather proof spaces between the logs which would again stop the cold or rain and snow from the inside.
“ The last work my father did, she explained, “ was chinking and daubing the steeple on one of Buckhorn’s early churches in Buckhorn,” adding, “Its so provoking that historians don’t mention all those lovely people who started the schools at Buckhorn.”
Her diploma from Witherspoon College was dated 1920. She also recalled the flu epidemic of 1918: “Many, many people died. My mother and I went day and night helping. When the war broke out many of the doctors had to go to war, and we’d call the medical centers in Lexington and Louisville just to get advice.”
Her father, also a sheriff, worked part time as a male nurse. “The flu was the hardest on pregnant women,” she continued. “At one time some people from Philadelphia came and started a school for the children that had been orphaned.”
I always enjoy hearing history come alive from those who experienced it. That time, because it so near my own birthplace, had such interesting facets I made a lot of notes. But most of all I want to say thank you to all of those who “Chinked and Daubed.”
Christmas Memories
Red and Green color December with a happy swirl of joy and love. I tell you, folks, it is a time to dig out the love present in all of us. It’s ready this months, tickled forth by the beloved holidays.
I can’t write about it (or even think about it) without revisiting the dear mountains of my childhood. A family home, stuck in a sloping Appalachian beauty of a hillside, our stone home, was handmade by our father and other relatives. Cut from other areas of those southeastern hills, the quarried rocks seemed to me to simply pick up the job of the surrounding hills: surrounding us with safety.
Today, as I snuggle by my fireplace and let myself think back, I see a freshly-cut pine tree standing in a living room corner, covered almost every inch by home-made decorations: white strips of paper, taped and looped into circles fashioned into a scalloping-appearing chain around the fragrant branches.
At any time of recollection, when I relax in my chair, the true colors of this wintry season slip in to overpower the reds and greens. A shimmering sparkling takes over my senses. Only one answer for that sensation: – Love. That soft and thunderous feeling is inside humans, waiting to reach out with power to touch other humans, drawing them in.
Watch a new mother holding her baby and you can see and feel that power encircle all the humans within that space. So much love is available and there to be shared, to be thrown out to fellow humans. They don’t have to be relatives, but a stranger on the street who smiles to transfer love to a fellow human as you meet.
Millions of writers work with billions of words tor try and describe this soul-swelling thing available to us all. I must say, what appears here in my memory –my initial consciousness of this power. I had climbed to the very top of a steep mountains behind our home there in those lovely mountains. When I looked eastward I glimpsed the glitter of a small stream, called Poll’s Creek. Above the sky softened into a soft, indescribable blue. My heart swelled with something like magic, but it only took a while of growing up to put a name on that feeling, Love.
More than 60 years of some of my eight or so decades of life in my work life I worked with words. I’ve tried. Lord knows, I’ve tried to describe that feeling, that unstoppable power that knits us together. And if we’re very lucky, and try, we’ll be
Blessed enough to meet many sizes and senses other human reaches, all wrapped in Love.
Savor this season! And Happy Christmas to all the days of your life. And may love surround you as you move through your years.
Comforting Waves of Heat
When the onslaught of snow, ice, sleet and wind descend on my part of the planet, I can’t stop my brain from digging out some childhood scenes. These are more than seeing, they contain more –hearing, shivering and feeling.
Feeling cold, that is. Cold feet, cold hands accompanied by a strange stiffness in my limbs.
However; I see myself climbing a hill, looking upward, catching glimpses of sky softened by white, white clouds. And I knew my home was just about one-third the way to the top.
Allowing into my consciousness a drift of that solace-giving structure, gave me enough strength to keep on going upward, and lifted my heart toward the blue-white above me. I responded with every bit of strength I had left in my young body, arriving at the back door, which, when open welcomed me with a blast of warm air from the big iron cook stove just inside he kitchen.
At that time in the great slopes of the Appalachians, no electricity reached our home. Built by my father, who learned stonework from his father and his brothers. I always imagined they had carved the big rocks out of some of those tall slopes that had always made me feel safe under their protective shapes.
Two large rooms in our house had wood and coal burning fireplaces; in the kitchen, the cook stove could also heat that large room. However, in zero weather one needed to gather close to the stove or one of the fireplaces to feel the comforting waves of heat. We pulled our chairs as close to the flaming grate as we could to do our homework.
Sometimes our parents would keep us home when the weather reached zero or below. Of course we always walked the mile and half or so, to school and our parents knew how difficult it was to heat the wood-walled building heated only by one pot-bellied stove in the center.
But, oh, the warm beds. Sometimes Mom would wrap our feet in warm cloths and put extra quilts on top. There were always hand made colorful patch-worked covers to heap up and keep out cool air as the fire died down during the night.
Featherbeds helped too, their softness cradling a kid with warmth. Always, always cold air encircled us as we moved about. Outside was the enemy, I can recall how we hurried to get inside.
And, to this day, I am very grateful that my Ohio home is warm, that lights are glowing in all spaces needed….and in summer, we can get cool!
Kitchen Blessings
If you grew up as I did, watching your mother stitch up a new dress for you, felt delight when a friend or relative donated a “gently used “ something to wear, I’ll just bet somewhere in your mind’s “clothing files, the word “oil cloth,” might pop up.
That term conjures up a table laden with bowls of freshly cooked green beans, pork chops, fried apples, a pone of corn bread (shut up, computer, I looked “pone” up in the New World dictionary and it is correct) and glasses of milk.
Consider this, no electricity reached into that area of the Southern Appalachians, so to keep our dairy products cool we had to lower buckets of milk into the dark depths of our hand-dug artesian well. It was never too cool, but just right.
Then, before someone could pick up a spoon or fork, we had to “ask the blessing.”
Mind you, no matter how big our family grew there was room around that oil-cloth-covered table. The youngest child who could form basic English, learned to pray for all of us.
Though I’m of advanced age and have lived in Butler County most of my married life, one of my five brothers drives to my house one morning each week and we have breakfast together. As soon as he arrives we spread the breakfast he as brought on the table and seat ourselves in front of the kitchen window, And he asks the blessing. It is only a bit longer than the youngest praying when we were kids.
Out mountain kitchen was heated by invisible waves emanating from that big, wood-fed stove that so aptly cooked everything from pinto beans to peanut butter fudge and various parts of a pig.
One of the kitchen doors opened onto a large back porch in the southwestern corner of which stood a square opening into the ground below. Talk about upper body strength, you over-handedly pull up gallons of fresh cool water. Cooking and washing dishes required lots and lots of hand over hand lifting as did mopping and scrubbing the floors and, of course, bathing for all of us.
All of that featured and surrounded the quarried-stone house our father constructed, after quarrying the stones from the beloved mountains all around us.
I think all 12 of us children who survive our parents, remember the words of that “blessing.”
One Day of Memory
We ran for the end of the rows of corn as soon as the rain started. After all, the late summer weather had featured a few scattered clouds once in awhile. And we never knew when a sudden shower would dampen our steeply sculpted side of a lovely Appalachian slope.
There, my father had decided to put most of our corn crop. In those days having a lot of corn was next to being able to feed the family.
Huddled under the shifting shelter of a few oaks and maples, my brothers, sisters and I marveled at how the dark green curves of corn blades proudly lifted diamond-like sparkly raindrops.
Like most farming families of that area and that time, our family worked together at all chores involved in raising acres of garden vegetables, great swaths of corn planted in looping rows scalloping the undulating hills. We hoed the entire corn patch three times each season.
Getting the corn “laid-by” sometime in late summer meant the hoes could rest at the end of the last day. Sighs of relief accompanied our journey down the slope to the house where Mom had supper on.
Clad in dozens of different-colored trees, their leaves sweetening the air with red, gold, orange and burgundy hues, the encircling mountains always gave me a sense of safety, as though nothing harmful could enter there.
Hot: At the time of getting the corn “laid by” was, it seemed to me, the hottest part of the year.
Yet, nothing dims my memory of that part of the country where I grew out of childhood and into my teens. Paths wound around and upward through the forests that surrounded our land and kids could explore to their heart’s content. Animal tracks, burrows and even occasionally the sight of a mother deer and her baby delighted us.
In winter we could track rabbits in the snow (their distinctive footprints) gave a group of youngsters high anticipations of the next delicious meal.
Our house was built of solid rectangular stone quarried out of one of those hillsides by our stone-mason Dad. Along those slopes he and his kids and friends and constructed a log barn to house horses, cows and sheep; too, a chicken house featured roosting positions as well as straw-covered bottoms of rows of nests.
From time I was little I loved to go into that place and lift out eggs, one at a time, to
have at breakfast. To his day I love them, boiled fried or scrambled.
It was not a bad place to grow up. A sparkling creek flowed past at the bottom of our mountain, fording water-power for a grist mill Dad had constructed on its banks. It was great for kids to hunt crawdads and wade.
I can say, looking back across 84 years of memory, I do not regret a day of that life.
Making Do, No iPads Needed
Much of the time these days I feel as though I am inextricably caught in and ever increasing tangle of technology.
Quickly, with a flip of some long forgotten memory color in my brain, comes a snow-covered slope; and my brothers and I deep into building a sled with runners to slide like the wind down of one of the slopes. (We could, perhaps have been finished much faster with the aid of a few electric saws and drills.)
If the mountain people who tucked their lives into the isolation of hills and hollows of the Appalachians nearly a century ago knew anything, they knew how to “make do.”
A red-hot iron poker, left a required amount of time half buried in the fireplace embers served well to burn perfectly round holes in the front and back ends of sled runners we had hewn to a slick, curving surface on their bottom. Dowels, fastened into those holes, helped form the sled’s foundation.
Relishing the icy wind in our faces, we’d ride down the hill as fast as we could without falling off.
All around, on snowy days, the mountains offered up their special brand of beauty. One of my memories keeps fresh a scene created by a quick overnight freeze on the heels of an evening rain. A glittering, shimmering, fairy land greeted us that next morning.
Coated with ice, every tiny limb and branch from the mountaintop down to the creek sparkled like ropes of diamonds, dazzling the eyes. A thousand differently-shaped jewels flung beautiful bounties into the morning air.
Later, cold to the bone we’d rush back inside to gather around the open fire, feeling the warmth chase the ice, melting frozen jeans from around the ankles. Lunch of soup beans (pintos) and hot, buttered corn bread completed the warm-ups.
Every season held its special treat for the eyes and hearts. And the stone fireplace lining held heat in such comforting measures, one could hardly keep from taking a cozy little nap.
No technology needed.
Heat and Snakes
Living without air conditioning in my house for about a week unraveled a skein of memories of my childhood in the Appalachians.
Temperatures between mid eighties and nineties warmed the house all the way through walls and windows in kitchens, family rooms and bedrooms. I found myself running to the cooler homes of relatives for hours at a time.
I recalled July heats back in the mountains where our cornfields curved around the slopes while our family went, hoe in hand to chop out invasive weeds and rake fresh dirt up around the tender stalks.
Polls Creek gurgled and tumbled around the edge of our property, making its way over a mill dam my father constructed to run a gristmill which ground grains of corn into fine meal for use in cooking – in cornbread, grits, gravies and other things, like corn muffins.
One “hot” story I remember had to do with a big snake. Don’t ask me what kind it was, I didn’t stop to identify it. Curled on a big flat rock rising up from the waves of the creek, it was in a sunny patch. I had my shoes on that day. I was going to my grandparents’ home, just across and down stream.
Snakes formed one of the strongest ranks of the enemies we had in those hills. We were taught to be afraid. My mother had various was of getting rid of the enemy, whether it was a pole ax or a shotgun or a rifle. Among the enemy troops were Copperheads, Rattlesnakes and a host of poisonous ones.
The reason I jumped out of my skin that day, landing in a deeper water hole than I anticipated, was, he slithered off the rock and into the water on the side I had claimed for myself. Never mind, I could jump high as I ran, too. Which I did. Got to Grandma’s house in record time.
Recalling the heat in those days, a good half a century ago, doesn’t make it seem as uncomfortable as I am today, sitting in my family room with a computer on my knees. I am reeeeely, reeeellly hot.
Back then we found relief under branches of oaks and maples and ash trees; we could dangle our bare feet in a trickle of cold water escaping a mountain spring to flow downward. (Snakes avoided people with hoes. Hoes were high in our ammo of snake killers.)
During my four-plus decades of newspaper writing I talked to scores of mountain-born people who migrated to these parts. I heard many tales of trials and difficulties of living in that part of our beloved country. But, cutting through their life stories, was a continual brightness of how much they loved (and still loved after moving north) the hills of southeastern Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.
I feel that way too. When I return there for a visit, even if the weather is hot, I get that feeling of security that comes from being surrounded by the beautiful, high slopes.
Still in the Mountains
I used to think God brought babies down to the top of one of our towering Appalachian mountains and there he met the midwife who visited our house a lot, and there he left the new life that would add to our family.
Of course every time that happened after I was old enough to know that I was being sent across Polls Creek to my grandparents’ home to stay until someone (usually my father) came to pick me up and take me home, I couldn’t figure it out.
But later after it had happened two or three more times and each time a new brother or sister and a midwife was there when I got home, it made me mad. I didn’t like that kind of treatment.
Of course, I’m stretching memory farther back than it will go. After I grew until my memory cells kicked in, I knew what was going on, swallowed my frustration and went along with it.
My mother gave birth 13 times, most of them with the assistance of that lovely midwife who rode a horse to most of her patients’ homes. And we all grew up loving the constancy of those tree-covered, pasture-filled, hills; as soon as we were old enough to count three cornstalks, we could go up the hillside to work in the corn field.
Almost oblivious to the beauty around us we went to school, learned the operation of a mountain farm a grist mill and how to fish and trap and snake long logs for firewood down the hill.
There were enough chores always to go around. When we weren’t working or in school we were FREE. Free to slip off into the hillsides to climb and climb. Our parents felt cool about us taking off into the woods, after all you either went up or down. It was not easy to get lost.
I can reach the memory cells as I found a wounded bird (I suspected the culprits were my brothers and their sling-shot weapons.) I dug a tiny cave in the hard clay by the trickle of a branch of water. Then from the house I found bread crumbs for him.
A colorful panorama greeted heralded the changing of each season, especially, spring, summer and fall, easing from palest pinks and softest greens to raging, blazing reds and yellows, purples and a dozen other summer hues leading into the crash of the sweet gum trees with their half a dozen tones divided up among the own leaves. I always thought those trees were moving, swaying miracles.
White gowns of snow greatly helped the tracking of animals as winter brought its own brand of change. We learned that rabbits leave a quirky, three-cornered track.
So much to learned, so much to enjoy. The person who said “You can’t take the mountains out of the man. (or woman), even you take the man out of the hills.”
I surely brought them out with me. More later. My memory is running on high just now.
Breathing Zero
Cornstalks, stiff against thickening morning fog,
In silence signal autumn,
While banner-tailed squirrels,
Racing light as air across grassy fields, stop
To dig for imaginary nuts.
As crispy, early sunrise battles fog, humans
Shiver in a chill that somehow whispers
Almost inaudibly, breathing zero degrees,
And hide in secret, barren woods
Waiting to roar on stage in icy fury.
Oak Island, N.C. poem
Surf sound rises like cooling gray ashes.
Obliterating other noises,
Wind niggles the skin
With sharp, angry caresses.
She steps toward hissing waves,
Following the action toward the
Mountain of ocean; in the silken hiss
Toes taste warm, silvery sea-sparkle.
Ahead, tiny fish rush into their
Life-liquid, wiggling, flipping
Glittering, hurrying as though
Chased by a thousand dry-land demons.
Moonrise paints a silver, tide tickled highway.
Tommy Toes
I’ve had a lot of jobs in my 80-something years. The first I can remember is among acres of cornstalks taller than my small height. Corn was one of the most important crops treasured by farmers in the southeastern part of Kentucky, deep in the
Appalachian mountains where I spent a lot of my child hood.
Our cornfields ran almost straight up the slopes where we climbed to hoe the rows, that stood like soldiers as our family members worked among them. They needed hoeing at least three times a season. But my job came early in the lives of the little corn –thinning corn. I must leave three plants in each hill, so I had to know how to count.
Speaking of thinning corn reminds me of a little essay mailed to me by a first cousin, Schuyler Day of Kernersville, NC. I’m sure he wrote it shortly before his death several years ago. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, but we grew up along Polls Creek in Leslie County. I’m including the following writing in his memory. It is titled ‘Tommy Toes.”
We called them Cherry Tomatoes, but our grandparents called them Tommy
Toes and planted them throughout the cornfields and around the edges of the gardens and creeks. Fifty to 75 years ago people in those mountains planted every bench and cove of land in large grain white corn to provide cornmeal for their family as well as feed for their horses, mules, cows, hogs, chickens, ducks and geese.
Corn was a staple and certainly necessary for the mountain families. Those who had an abundant supply of corn used it like cash to barter for labor. Those who didn’t, gladly worked three days for just a bushel of corn to grind for meal to feed their families.
This writer’s grandmother told about carrying Tommy Toes seeds in her apron pocket, and planting them while hoeing corn on a hillside far from the house and water.
She had a plan in mind. Later in the summer or early fall the tiny foods would ripen just in time when fodder was ready to be harvested and the weather hot and dry. At that time a large handful of them would take away thirst as well as offer a burst of new energy. Finding a vine full of yellow Tommy Toes might be equal to finding Easter eggs to both adults and children,” Schuyler wrote.
His piece brought a lot of memories foaming into my head. One, the lovely sight of the tomato plants, growing in glowing coils knee-high on cornstalk and weed. The yellow colors sliced through greenery where Mom had scattered seeds she had dried in the summer sun on a window sill. Dried, they were stored until planting time.
As they grew and bloomed they looked for all the world like the edging of embroidery Mom crocheted around pillow case edges.
A fistful of the tiny tomatoes slaked dry throats and flowed with bursts of energy through small forms at work. Today perhaps, we’d call them an energy snack.
Grace and 66 Books
I can’t stop looking at babies, even the ones in TV commercials. They are so sweet, sleeping or waking. I never liked to wake a sleeping child. They look so peaceful as they fall into a nap.
When one of my grand daughters was about nine, she used to spend a couple of nights a week at my house, so I had the duty of getting her up and ready for school.
One morning I was having a difficult time getting her up. I tried gently telling her the time in a normal voice. She didn’t stir. I tried a couple of other phrases, no success. The time was ticking away. I leaned over the bed near her and softly said: “Genesis.”
Her dark head shot up off the pillow: “Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,” she said clearly. She was ready to get up. See? One of our latest projects was learning the books of the Bible, starting with the Old Testament. We had agreed on learning four at a time.
Our day was beginning just fine.
Later that week I happened to be talking to one of my sisters (I have a half a dozen of them). Telling her the story. She laughed and said: “Agnes (another sister)
and I used to use those as memory things to keep time with our scrubbing clothes on a washboard. And we did it four at a time.”
Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I could see the two of them out in the back yard of our Kentucky home, taking turns bending over a big galvanized wash tub, up to their elbows in hot suds, scrubbing clothes up and down on of my sis rough, corrugated metal, splashing a shirt up out of the water to add home made lye soap, to the collar then scrubbing. . . “Genesis, Exodus. . . “
We all learned the books of the Bible, all 66 of them. Goodness knows, we never wanted to be caught not knowing how to find a verse. I had explained to that grand daughter that if you knew the books in order you never had to look for page numbers. “Like the alphabet,” she said, and was satisfied.
I couldn’t let go of the scene in my head: Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job (wring out the shirt and put it in the rinse water) Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes. . .
I remember my childhood home with fondness, and sometimes pain, although I know the winters were cold, the work difficult and money nearly non-existent. But better memories stand like sentinels, such as Poll’s Creek tumbling and rushing over bottom rocks in the stream and feeling to the bare, wading feet indescribably delicious.
I loved to climb those slopes, feeling I was gaining grace and glory with each step; so that by the time I stood on the monumental stone outcropping at the pinnacle I could get a good look at the silver ribbon of creek far below.
Old Woman
Memory at times needs a little push—some help in uncovering the essence of an occurrence in our lives. If I could recall all the names of the people who have shown up in my stories during the nearly half a century or so I tried to fit into the world of journalism, I would be so happy.
However, even if I don’t remember names, I can, with a smidge of a nudge, bring to mind their stories.
Take the 80-something woman I surprised one day as she sat under a maple in the front yard of her tidy little home. I called on her several times when I was in her neighborhood. Used to finding her breaking green beans, shelling peas or shucking corn, I was surprised on the day of this visit, at the pen and notebook in her hands.
Since she tried to tuck them under her apron, I decided not to ask her what she was writing. Neither did I press her about her age or other aspects of her life. Usually, when I stopped by we talked about our families; she always mentioned her son, but I never met him.
I relaxed as we chatted and waited for the bits of wisdom she utters without thinking, paying much attention to my jotting in my own notebook. Always ready to comment on her small country home region, or the world at large, she had opinions on all of it.
Obviously, she kept up with everything by reading books, newspapers and the seldom-used TV in the corner of her living room. I had learned over the years of knowing her, that she loved the outdoors. It’s almost as though her house was an afterthought, a place to come in out of the rain, or hide from the cold. Her yard was a symphony of color, each plant lovingly tended.
I knew her pretty well, her home being in Kentucky. And while to some, admitting you are a Kentuckian lowers your intelligence by several notches, my friend had an opinion about that, noting that she “never minds those remarks.
“Some folks can’t take a step up without putting their feet on someone’s back,” she said. “They’re weak.” She says it with no malice. Sometime before that I had asked her how did it feel being “her age” without mentioning the 80s.
“Child,” she said, chuckling, “it feels as good as it did when I was 20.”
I wondered again if I should ask her what she was writing, but decided against it.
She corresponds with dozens of friends. She has lots of friends; they gravitate to her like metal filings to a magnet.
When they visit she receives each one with joy. She has gone through some rough times in her life, someone told me once, having lost her husband in a tragic coal mining accident during which workers were trapped underground. She doesn’t talk about those times. I have learned not to ask about certain things. “I don’t talk about things that are no help,” she said.
As I left I saw a fist sized wad of paper in the path that crosses her yard. In my car I smoothed the paper out. I never would have guessed poetry, but there it was, what was clearly a poem; a few lines were visible, although a great pencil slash ran through them. It said:
Around the mountainside they came/God and a hundred others/I called to God, all said the same/ it seems they all were brothers…
At the Cabin
A sweet wind spilling like silk,
Wipes across the grass, rippling
While Farmer Eugene Wells
Claws the softened soil
With metal machine
Making rows
Into which
Seeds fall
And linger
Until
The
Life breathes,
Stirs deeply, strongly
Surging, pushing against
Clods toward clear sunshine
Not yet, not now Little Life
Take some more time
To nap and snooze
For a few months.
You must wait
For spring.
Heat
Living without air conditioning in my house for about a week unraveled a skein of memories of my childhood in the Appalachians.
Temperatures between mid eighties and nineties warmed the house all the way through walls and windows in kitchens, family rooms and bedrooms. I found myself running to the cooler homes of relatives for hours at a time.
I recalled July heats back in the mountains where our cornfields curved around the slopes while our family went, hoe in hand to chop out invasive weeds and rake fresh dirt up around the tender stalks.
Polls Creek gurgled and tumbled around the edge of our property, making its way over a mill dam my father constructed to run a gristmill which ground grains of corn into fine meal for use in cooking – in cornbread, grits, gravies and other things, like corn muffins.
One “hot” story I remember had to do with a big snake. Don’t ask me what kind it was, I didn’t stop to identify it. Curled on a big flat rock rising up from the waves of the creek, it was in a sunny patch. I had my shoes on that day. I was going to my grandparents’ home, just across and down stream.
Snakes formed one of the strongest ranks of the enemies we had in those hills. We were taught to be afraid. My mother had various was of getting rid of the enemy, whether it was a pole ax or a shotgun or a rifle. Among the enemy troops were Copperheads, Rattlesnakes and a host of other poisonous ones.
The reason I jumped out of my skin that day, landing in a deeper water hole than I anticipated, was, he slithered off the rock and into the water on the side I had claimed for myself. Never mind, I could jump high as I ran, too. Which I did. Got to Grandma’s house in record time.
Recalling the heat in those days, a good half a century ago, doesn’t make it seem as uncomfortable as I am today, sitting in my family room with a computer on my knees. I am reeeeely, reeeellly hot.
Back then we found relief under branches of oaks and maples and ash trees; we could dangle our bare feet in a trickle of cold water escaping a mountain spring to flow downward. (Snakes avoided people with hoes. Hoes were high in our ammo of snake killers.)
During my four-plus decades of newspaper writing I talked to scores of mountain-born people who migrated to these parts. I heard many tales of trials and difficulties of living in that part of our beloved country. But, cutting through their life stories, was a continual brightness of how much they loved (and still loved after moving north) the hills of southeastern Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.
I feel that way too. When I return there for a visit, even if the weather is hot, I get that feeling of security that comes from being surrounded by the beautiful, high slopes.
April … Sweet and Joyous
With our ever-growing Fairfield parks system, the city becomes more beautiful each year. . . and I have lived here many years.
The donation of trees honoring Bob and Helen Wessel, reminded me again of what a nice way that is to thank our citizens. Especially people like the Wessels who served the city in so many ways, from Bob’s being the first mayor to both of them doing dozens and dozens of other things to help the town grow.
Among the parks, Harbin Park is a favorite of mine, perhaps because our family has so many memories of times there. I recall taking a granddaughter on a walk there once.
She was about five, I think. I let her take the lead in our walk.
Soon we crossed a grassy stretch and moved on into a small woods. She got ahead of me and squealed for me to come and see. There, she delightedly pointed to a weaving growth of large roots from a tall maple spanning a good-sized gully below. We had a lot of fun balancing our way across to the other side.
Picnics aplenty we enjoyed up there. In fall a panorama of mixed yellows, red, oranges and greens turned the landscape into breathtaking scenes, blazing at sunset.
Human beings are, it seems to me, connected to nature in unspeakably important ways. When I recollect my own childhood, those memories, rich with mountains, creeks and wild animals as well as plants, inhabit the senses. No criminals peopled those hillsides. (There, early in my memory, no roads snaked around the hillside as they did later on.)
My parents allowed the children the freedom of climbing all the way to the mountaintop; after all, copperheads and rattlesnakes didn’t like humans any better than we liked them.
Sweet gum trees, my favorite, were easy to climb. Kids could do many fun things as they roamed those rocky slopes. My brothers and I liked to “discover” odd plants, check out rabbit holes and animal paths (narrow little lanes with tiny prints we could try to identify) and follow open ground under a canopy of leaves.
By the time I was the age of that young granddaughter, I was accustomed to going to the cornfield where, high on the hillside, rows of corn looped around the steep slope. I went to the field when I was maybe four or five. That was old enough to thin corn. Young corn could only have three slender, green shoots in hill about three feet apart in order for healthy growth
Later in my life, a long time later; I recall those times as sweet and joyous. Cool water, stored in Mason jars and left under ground at the end of the cornrows, was delicious. We rested under the shade and Poppy told stories loosely based on fairy tales we had heard.
He would take the Rip Van Winkle tale and weave a half a dozen sidebars; angles about “Ole Rip’s” past we had never heard. His additions to the various plots were always different.
I miss those mountains. . . And I wish for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren the joys of the woods and the solitude that can sometimes fill the soul.
Maul and Froe
Answer this question: What are a maul and a froe? What are their uses?
Those answers are easy to find within the pages of “Trails into Cutshin Country,” by Sadie Wells Stidham. Sub headlines on the jacket of that book are “Leslie County, Kentucky, a Folk History of Facts and Fiction.”
I must say I am a distant relative of the author and that Leslie County, Ky is the place of my birth. So I’ve owned that book since its publication in 1978. I appreciate greatly her way of describing our ancestors’ reason for coming to what they called “The New World.”
Author of many books and articles about that part of the country, she had a way of putting history into easy-to-understand terms, skipping across years and oceans and long and difficult miles of wilderness.
By the way, I’m not telling how old I am, but I can say I have used a maul (a wooden kind of hammer handy for pound a cutting instrument into slabs of wood to form it into thin roofing boards). And a froe, was that axe-like tool for slicing the roof boards.)
One chapter, titled “Death and Graveyard Tales,” has ghost stories alluding to many conversations with her friends and acquaintances throughout her life. Stidham taught school in Leslie and Laurel counties more than 30 years, and knew thousands of area folks.
I like this one titled “Dirty Beard,” because I heard it when I was little. Here it is as it appears in Chapter Nine: Once when Dirty Beard was coming home, he came up the holler and he had to pass a graveyard. When he got near the graveyard, something with a big white sheet on jumped up behind him on his mule.
He rode on a piece and the ghost was still with him. He looked around and said to it: “Old feller, you had better hold on tight, because there are two of us now. There’s just going to be one of us soon!” He put the spur to the mule with all his might. The mule started running as fast as it could. When Dirty Beard looked around the next time. He saw that it was gone.
I like Stidham’s sentences. One, opening a chapter, starts: “Over a hundred years ago, most people lived a hearty and natural life in the open country.”
That “country” resides in my mind as a cozy place in which to snuggle as the tall slopes rose into the sky like a protective wall. It felt that way to me when I was growing up. In winter the strong bones of the mountains appeared as the leaves left the trees and trees’ naked shapes stood outlined against the sky.
Good stuff, that book.
Sharon’s Granny
Good thing about words—they last. I’m nuts about words, have been most of my life.
As a result, among the many shelves, drawers and boxes in the house I’ve occupied the last few decades are thousands of words, all lined up in configurations that make sense.
I was delighted the other day as I wandered through files and folders, sorted papers, read and marveled at the things I found.
One thing that stop my search was this poem about my mother. And no, I didn’t write it. A niece, Dr. Sharon Gill of Murray State University, did. Some years ago, before my mother, Minnie Williams Stidham died, Sharon and been to “Granny’s” Kentucky home to visit. She titled her work:
“Granny”
Granny thinks there aren’t as many
Stars as there used to be.
She grew up in the mountains
Long before rural electricity.
How black must have been a moonless night
A hundred miles from electric light,
Too dark to know a familiar place
Or see your hand in front of your face.
But what a show there was to see
As you gazed up into eternity.
She thinks they’re fallen—the stars I mean,
I try to say they can’t be seen
Beyond the glare of lights from town.
She thinks the stars have fallen down
One star fir every man who’s died
From wars or fighting. I have tried to say
That stars don’t fall, they’re fixed;
But she has seen them, and the Scriptures say
Their falling marks the end
Of time, I think of friends,
Wrapped up in domes of yellow light,
Who’ve never seen a star-filled night,
Their masked, fear-dimmed eternity
Mourned by astronomers, Granny and me.
Dr. Sharon Gill
Her Granny bore 13 children in the hills and farmlands of eastern Kentucky. She was a strong woman, who carried on with her big family after her husband died in the sixties.
Dr. Gill is one of dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren who called her Granny; and who treasured visits to her home where a huge tree in her front yard offered swinging games for them all.
My memories of my mother are as crisp as ever; I can see her fingers flying across the black-and-white keys of the foot-pedaled organ. Among the tunes I recall are “Darlin’ Nellie Gray,” many, many hymns, and other lilting ones that could have been background for square dances.
I see her feeding chickens, spreading shelled corn caught up in her apron, and stirring up chocolate pudding at big, hot iron stove.
I still miss her.
My Dad, My Mountains, and Me
We were still climbing toward the top of the mountain when I called to my father to stop. “Look!” I told him, as I pointed back the way we had just come. June’s warm rays by that time of the year had done their annual duty by pulling out millions of the tree leaves and stained them a thousand shades of green.
However, softening the colors below like sheets of nearly sheer cotton, were layers and layers of fog. I was little. I was feeling like the luckiest girl in all this big mountainous world, for I had Pop all to myself.
Talk of heroes. This tall mountain man had constructed a strong stone home halfway up that hillside to house his growing family; he had spent his young life helping his father support that family. Now, I stood in his shadow and listened as he turned to look down at me and say: “You know, honey, you are the one who always sees the beauty around us.”
Early in my young life I had stood with my mother and brothers and sisters as this tall man knelt by a tiny hand made headstone in a small graveyard and prayed over the body of a son who had lost his life at age 14 months. We have never forgotten that special spot halfway up the hill that faced our mountain.
Most families, perhaps, do not celebrate Father’s Day the way they to Mother’s Day. But we lost Pop many years before our mother died. Our number grew to 12 children: seven girls, five boys. All received equal treatment in our family. I remember carrying a hoe to the cornfield alongside the boys. Whoever could hoe fastest took the lowest row. One sure thing his kids learned early – what is was like to work.
We could count on Pop for all things big and little. A mountain minister, he traveled the county preaching. He made sure his kids knew the New Testament (and the Old), and could recite them all in order. If Mom burned the fried chicken we could count on Pop to say “That’s just the way I like it.”
He and Mom made the decision about which child (the youngest one who could talk) led the prayer at meals.
Kids could count on attending many weddings during their lifetime. We’d be playing in the creek or cutting stove wood when we’d notice a young, cuddling couple coming down the road toward our house. You see, Pop was licensed to marry folks.
That day, as we marveled at the cottony fog spreading an easy comfort-like feeling across our mountains, we turned as one and continued upward.
Both of us knew at the very top was a huge stone outcropping from which we could pause again, and, looking down as the rising sun took away the fog, get a long breathless look at Poll’s Creek as it curved and curled its way downward.
That small slice of time, alone with my Pop, still rests as sweetly as summer honey in my memory.
