Cool cloudy days like this one are a relief to me after several days in the sun doing mostly outdoor work.
I love being in the garden and mowing, weeding, etc., but it
seems like there’s always one more weed to pull or something else to plant or
pick.
However, when I got out of bed this morning to cloudy skies, then rain, I felt freer to turn my attention to inside work: laundry and writing,
for example.
I also listened in while Chelsea interviewed her “Granny
Grethel” for the research project she’s doing for Berea College. She’s been busy collecting oral histories
about Appalachian food ways.
My mother-in-law shared stories about making buttermilk candy
and told how to roast a groundhog so the meat doesn’t taste so wild (with
sprigs of spice wood).
She said she used to pick and sell blackberries and save her
money to order school clothes from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. She recalled how their house caught on fire
when her kids were small. She just happened to have a lot of water “drawed up”
to douse on it and put it out. (Yes, we
did veer a little off topic.)
She said the neighbors used to come running to see if you
needed help if you blew a car horn.
“We always had plenty to eat,” my mother-in-law said repeatedly.
“We always had a lot of love and we always got along.”
Except for when her father called them all to the breakfast
table, and they’d fight over who got the biggest boiled egg to crumble over
their biscuit and gravy.
A stranger with a camera might have surmised that her family
was impoverished. But what the camera
would have missed is how close they were, and how they went about their work
with good humor and lots of pranks pulled on one another.
My girls are fortunate to still have both sets of
grandparents and a great-grandmother to pass along such priceless information
about their heritage.
I never knew my dad’s parents--he barely knew them either, because
both died before he was six. I lost my
mom’s parents before I was 25.
I always felt like I missed out, not ever getting to meet my
paternal grandparents, and I still miss my maternal grandparents, though they’ve
been gone a long time.
My mother-in-law’s father died of prostate cancer when he
was 48. That’s mine and Robin’s
age. That’s young.
Her mother died of tuberculosis in her mid-fifties.
My husband still has his “Great-granny”--who now seems like
mine too--but there aren’t really many of our oldest family members left to
share their special memories of growing up in hard times… those difficult days
when work was physical and tough, but their days were also filled with laughter
and love.
As Chelsea captures audio of the voices of her interviewees
and painstakingly transcribes their dialect, she’s also noting the rhythms of
speech, the pronunciations and expressions that reveal our Scottish and Irish
ancestry.
I’m glad our speech hasn’t been blanched of its personality
by mainstream America. I hope to goodness it never is.
Many folks around here might not be aware that they are of Scotch-Irish
descent, but their language, beliefs, and customs carry echoes of previous generations
of settlers, who, while poor and not too book smart, were smart enough to
survive and thrive.
Tonight, to celebrate a cool cloudy pensive spring evening
and to honor our Appalachian ancestors who knew how to take the simplest
ingredients and whip up a tasty meal, Chelsea made homemade biscuits, and I
stirred up some chocolate gravy for supper.
I really needed a break from all those salad peas. ;)
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