My other passion............

My ebay listings....
My Etsy shop........
My Artfire listings......
This is a slide show of some of the things I have created and sold over the past couple of years...

Water from the Well

   I am glad I am writing this while my mom is 

still living because it may be too hard to write after she moves on to her heavenly home. She is 83 years old and has the constitution of a lion, I think. I won’t be surprised if she survives me because I do not have her physical energy.

  Mom grew up on the outskirts of Ironton, Ohio, about ½ mile from what is now Rt. 23, in a small town called Coreyville. It was a little house on the hillside with one bedroom, a kitchen, and a sitting room. The privy sat below the house on the hill beyond the dirt road and the well.  She was born the second of six children, on January 5^th, 1927.

There were neighbors right next door on one side and others further on down the road. There were plenty of kids to play and get into trouble with, on occasion. Mamaw and Papaw kept a close eye on their children, probably because five of the six were girls, but they pretty much had the run of the hill on which they lived. It made for a pretty good playground, all the way down to the creek in the bottom.

  They made a nice little swimmin’ hole at one spot in the creek and it  was my favorite place to play when we visited there. I can still smell the fresh scent that came from the water and the surrounding forest. I wasn’t allowed to go there by myself, but if my brother, who was 5 years older than me, went, I could go too. One hot summer day we were being watched by my aunt
Norma, the 5th of the 6 children, who was engaged to my uncle at the time, and they let us go to the creek.  There were several neighbor boys swimming there who were playing roughly so my brother told me to stay out of the water and wait for a while on the shore. I did as he said because I was afraid of those guys. But being only 5 years old, I couldn’t sit and do nothing for very long, so I began to pick up sticks and rocks off the ground to play with. Eventually, I wanted to do what every kid with a rock wants to do, throw it in the water.  So I looked for a calm space in the water to throw that rock. Just after it left my hand, up popped one of the boys, right where I had aimed that rock, and in a split second, he came out of the water with a gash in his forehead. He and his brothers ran home and I ran back to the house. I was terrified of what was going to happen to me.

   At the house, Greg told my aunt and soon to be uncle what had happened and they comforted me and actually understood that I had not purposely thrown a rock at him.  But his father did not see it that way. 

 We were outside, Aunt and Uncle in the swing on the front porch, Greg on the steps, and I exploring the yard, when he came storming over to the house looking to get me. When my aunt saw him coming after me, she said “You lay one hand on her and I‘ll get Greg’s bb gun and shoot you!” Fortunately, he left, in a huff of course, but he left. She threatened him with “Greg’s bb gun” because it was right there on the porch. I suspect if it weren’t there, she would have said “Papaw’s shotgun”, which wasn’t much further away in the house.  I didn’t really matter to me, just as long as he was gone. Even when my parents returned, I didn’t catch any punishment from them, other than a strong admonition about throwing rocks in the water when people were swimming. It never happened again. 
  When I was not much older, my grandparents moved down the road to South Point, because the new highway was going to destroy the road access to their house. We had to park at the top of the hill and walk down to the house as a result and we did that on nearly every visit until the old house burned down when I was a teenager. It became an empty, dilapidated old house, but it was full of memories that Mom, her parents, her siblings, and we had created which made partially for who I am today.

  When my aunt Betty passed away in 2004, my cousin Michelle and I walked over to my grandparents’ grave.  I said, “All because of them.” ...................

 .........And she said, 

 

“All because two people fell in love.”

Nothing could be more true.

Raisin’ Cain…

Raisin’ Cain…

Reading Jean’s account of her stubbornness in apologizing to her sisters and her dad’s relentless thrashing brought to mind the stories my dad told about growing up in the mountains and some of my experiences as a child. The leaf doesn’t fall far from the tree, so to speak.

In the book “Yesterday’s People”, the author states that in Appalachia, after children outgrew their cuteness, they were separated from the adults and sometimes left on their own, depending on older siblings or cousins for guidance. This was true in my dad’s life and mine, as I related about being left outside to play alone while visiting family. In the city, playing in the road would have been too dangerous and I would have been watched. Families may have been somewhat more protective of girls but I think generally, as long as you didn’t make waves, you were pretty much left alone. As long as you stayed away from the creek, the well, and other hazardous places, it was considered a safe place to be left alone.

That doesn’t mean that children weren’t around adults at all. It often meant that they were sharing adult responsibility, but they were not equal to adults. They were needed on the farm to help with the work and in the kitchen with food preparation and other household chores. Some folks consider this kind of thing abusive to children, but I disagree. I believe that sharing responsibility is one of the best things a family can do together, as long as too much isn’t expected of the children. But that’s just my opinion.

On with the story… Dad and his brother went to school but they also worked the farm along with Mark. Dad told us about one day when he and Clarence were planting corn in the field, they were hot and tired and wanted to go take a swim. Mark had told them to finish it but they decided it would be ok to go take a dip anyway. They hid the little bit of seed corn they had left in an old stump on the edge of the field and headed off to the creek for their cool retreat and soon forgot about the corn field. When they went home to dinner, Mark asked them if they had finished the planting and they told him yes, that they had run out of seed and then gone to the creek.

Needless to say, a short time later, guess what sprouted and started to grow in the old stump? Yep, you guessed it. It was now sporting a little crop of corn plants. Guess who found it first. Yep, Mark found it and he didn’t waste any time getting his strap and letting them have it.

I remember that strap. It always hung on the wall in their little bathroom in the house on Rt. 23, and I can tell you, I was afraid of that thing. It had to have been 3” or 4” wide and maybe 3’ long, or so it seemed to me as a kid. My parents never used a strap but I got enough lickins with Dad’s belt to keep me on the straight and narrow, at least until I left home at 18. That was a threatening tool that they would not hesitate to use. I don’t remember Granny ever whipping them in any of his stories. I guess because Mark was usually somewhere around, he handled most of that. But my mom sure could put the fear of God into you when she had a mind to.

Children are treated somewhat differently today and I can’t say that that is a bad thing. I doubt if my kids will ever spank their children, if and when they have some. But I think the way kids were left to grow up on their own, to a degree, is not much different today. Once they enter preschool, they have teachers and peers to help guide them, but they have to work through it with even less intervention from their parents than we and our parents did unless their parents work hard at staying connected to them. That isn’t easy to do.

Just this week, there was a story about a young mother, under 18, I presume because they would not tell her name, and her twin babies, just 4 months old. One of the twins was battered by her boyfriend and he passed away yesterday. The other little boy had broken bones and old wounds. I could not help but think, “Where on earth were her parents, or some other family members who might have prevented this child’s death if they had only been connected more closely with her?” My first reaction to the story was to think they should take that boyfriend and lock him in a room full of moms and let them have at him. But that’s my mountain momma genes talking. He was only 18, a child himself. He will pay a full adult penalty for what he did, I am sure. The surviving twin is now in foster care. Hopefully he will have a home before long.

Goin' Up Hargis

Goin' up Hargis.  That's what they called it, after they moved to Route 23, just outside of town.  I remember that house on Rt. 23. It was a small four rooms with a heater in the cellar that blew hot air up into the house through a grate in the floor. I remember how hot that grate would get and all the warnings not to run because you could fall on it and get burned. The kitchen was almost as large as the front room probably because that is where all of the indoor work was done. There was a small porch off of the kitchen with a narrow table where Granny would start seedlings in the spring or dry fruit and store old pots and pans underneath in the fall. From that porch you could step down into the yard which was made up of grass and clover, bordered by her zinias, touch me nots, and other flowers, on the sides, and a small creek which ran behind the house on the edge of the property.
...We drove anywhere from 6 to 8 hours to get there. That was before Interstate 64 and the Mountain Parkway were completed. Two lane state highways were curvy and narrow in many places and speed was limited by the incline of the terrain. So many hours in a car was hard on a kid. Mom would try to break the monotony by singing songs and teaching us games as we went along. I know we must have counted a million cows along the highway and a few thousand white horses. They were worth a whopping 100 points so there were a few skermishes over who saw them first between my brother and me that my mother would have to settle for us, usually with a threat of the belt. Dad was driving and if he got involved in it, we knew we were in really big trouble.
...Many times, we would arrive late at night because we could not leave Louisville until Dad got off work around 5:00 pm. I was usually asleep by the time we got there, so I remember very little of that. But the next day was filled with a whirl of activity. Granny would be cooking and Mark, my Grandpap, (who would not let us call him anything but Mark), would be talking and working on one thing or another with my Dad and brother. Mom and I were relocated to the kitchen with Granny, of course, as women did.
...The main communication tool then was the party line telephone. If you ever had a party line, you know you could pick up the phone and listen to others talking, so as news of our visit would spread through the area, throughout the day various relatives would drop by and visit for a while to catch up on the news and say hello and tell us how aunt so and so was troubled with swollen ankles and uncle Joe had diabetes and lost a toe or a foot. They didn't stay long because they were usually on their way to or from town on their way home. If they should happen in at meal time though, they were always invited to stay and eat.
...At some point during the day, someone would say, "Let's go up Hargis." Hargis is the holler where they lived before moving to Rt. 23, where my dad and uncle Clarence grew up on the farm between the hills. We would all pile into Mark's truck and go. The road to Hargis, now Hwy. 1409, was not paved until years later. It winded through the bottoms along Oil Springs and Pigeon Creek, and further into the hills. It may have been 3 or 4 miles from the main highway, but on a gravel and dirt road, it seemed like 100. When we finally arrived, we walked up the dry creek bed, about 1/4 mile uphill, to the house. It sat on a clearing between two hills with a tall rock chimney and a light bulb hanging from a wire on the front porch. Mark had installed the electric lights years before and none of them had shades or sconces. Even inside the house, they were bare bulbs hanging from wire. I visited the house many times as a baby but I have no other memory of it than this because they moved to town when I was very young.
...Out in the yard was a tall metal pipe with a flame coming from the top. It was part of the gas system that they used inside the house. How safe it was, I don't know, but it always had the smell of natural gas and we didn't like to get too close to it. There was a barn behind the house where they kept cows and a mule when it was a working farm. I do remember wanting so badly to ride that old mule. Dad had told tales of riding a mule to school and all through the hills. I may have been 4 years old, but when dad picked me up and put me on top of the mule, I was scared to tears and that was the end of my mule riding career.
...On some trips we would also visit other family who still lived up the holler. On one visit to an aunt and uncle, the adults were talking together in the house and I was left to play alone on the outside of their tiny home. My brother had taken off with some older cousins and left me behind to entertain myself. It had rained recently and I found a big old puddle in the road. It was full of pollywogs and I tried my best to catch some, but they got away. I wondered how they could live in water with a colorful halo like that. The halo was oil. Where it came from, I do not know, but it was in all the puddles.
...After our trip up Hargis, we spent the evening watching Porter Wagner and HeeHaw on Granny's old TV. Cable was not available then. Mark ran a wire up to the top of the hill where he had placed an antenna so as to be able to receive a signal. I don't remember how many channels it got, but I do know it did not get as many as we got in the city, all of three channels. As the sun set and the country music shows ended, everyone drifted off to bed. Mom and I slept together in the living room on a pull out couch bed, Dad and Greg slept in Clarence's room and Granny and Mark went to their own room. Other than the kitchen and the tiny bathroom, the house was packed with sleeping people.
...On Sunday morning Granny would fry ham and eggs and bake biscuits. Sometimes she would fry chicken. I always thought that was odd, but it wasn't odd to them. When leaving time came, we would hug and kiss and Granny would cry and Dad would assure them that we would be back and we sure would like for them to come visit us, which they never did until after Mark passed away and Granny came and spent the winters with us. Then we set off for the long ride home.
...Not every trip up Hargis was as pleasant, but those stories can be told another time.