Home, Sweet Home

Went out to get groceries from the car and

discovered that there was a visitor knocking

at the door (not literally) but he was standing there looking at me as if explanations were in order. He and his mate had moved into the top of one of the trees down by the creek. If one looked carefully when the wind was blowing, the walls of their cozy home could be seen.

On this particular day, our visitor showed no fear, no alarm. He (or she) sat by the side of the driveway and looked at me while I stood in the driveway looking back. That was almost two years ago and the Falcon family still live here. Monday afternoon, the two of them were soaring and dipping above the tall trees across the street. Then one of their offspring joined in the fun gliding and soaring, occasionally diving groundward only to soar again.

It's nice to know that birds of prey (and other wildlife)are making a comeback in the great Mid-West. The irony is that our home is actually in a city, a small city but it is a city. That same day while the next door neighbor was off riding with Rolling Thunder (the veterans' motorcycle group), Mama Groundhog (or woodchuck as some would call her) was checking out his yard along with two of her babies. She was startled by a car passing on the street and hurriedly retreated to the side of my neighbor's house only to come back to the front lawn a couple of minutes later. Unfortunately, the camera was in the house and not nearby.

Just before dark, the neighborhood doe will be out with her yearling fawns. I have seen only those three this year . I am sure that they bed down somewhere near the creek because they stroll through the yard quite often. I worry though, they have lost their fear of cars and have already figured out that Moe and Ceasar, the dogs, though they are barking are securely in the house and pose no threat to the well being of visiting deer.

The squirrels are making pests of themselves. When I walked to the care yesterday, I kicked a chewed up green peach from the walkway. I knew squirrels loved the buckeyes, hickory nuts and walnuts that grow in the yard and I have long suspected that no tulips bloomed the last two years because some creature had eaten the bulbs. Could that be a squirrel...namely the one I caught sitting in the top of the peach tree with a green fruit in his paws? I wonder???? All I know for sure is that it wasn't the albino squirrel that at first glance I mistook for a skunk say two weeks ago when I walked the dogs early in the morning.

jmp, 5/59/09

I'm a What???????

The news today is very thought provoking. All of a sudden because she identifies with not only her gender but also who she is culturally, Sonia Sotomayor is a racist, a bigot, etc? There are some crazy people in this world who defy logic and reason with every breath they draw and every spurious so-called argument that rolls from their lips.

I am a woman. That statement alone gives me sisterhood with a significant portion of the world's population. I have given birth to children and that gives me sisterhood with another portion of the world's population. There is not a person on this earth who was born male who has more than theoretical knowledge of the experience of a woman's pregnancy and subsequent childbirth. No matter how empathetic a male person is, if he hasn't physically carried a child and given birth, he does not know what the experience is!

I have lost two children. Their father has lost two children. Both of us share feelings with other parents who have lost children. That loss is a highly charged, intense pain that takes years (if ever) to go away. There is no measuring stick to numerically chart the hurt in a scientific way. The pain is not gender specific, it is parent specific and there is another case of "if you haven't been there, you don't really know!"

Being on the receiving end of racist (sexist) behavior in this country (or any other) is a very dehumanizing experience. I remember well being told that I would not be considered from an editorial job on a newspaper because after all "that is a job for a man." I remember an insurance company which wrote the policy on a car bought in my name, paid for out of my bank account, licensed in my name, driven only by me.....was re-written in my husband's name three weeks after we married! That may surprise some of you younger people but in fact, this did happen although it is not likely now. I know a former husband and wife team of engineers who once worked for a major defense contractor. The husband was forced out of his job ...not because of professional incompetence but because he was a black man in a position to supervise a non-black work group. The woman was kept on but not in a supervisory position... her job was to train (but not supervise) her husband's replacement. Those experiences in the workplace or in life influence your viewpoint on work, and life.
Your understanding of what goes on in the "real world" is shaped by your life experiences. Of course, if you have never experienced racist or sexist attacks on your person, if you have always lived in an isolated, insulated world attacks that happen to other people are trivialized and you want to protect your isolated, insulated life experience.

I am also reminded of an elderly substitute teacher I worked with several years ago. She came from a very wealthy family had inherited megabucks but had married a man of modest means and loose fists. Finally, she managed to divorce him but since she had never worked during the marriage, he got ALL the money and she was left impoverished (in spite of the fact that the majority of money was hers from the start)! I'm sure that this lady's ex-husband would have considered losing access to her money to be quite unjust only because she had the nerve to divorce him. Was this justice! Of course not but it was reality.

I do not know Sonia Sotomayor but I have lived long enough to know that life experiences should not be minimalized and discarded. History can not be thrown away becaue it carries over and affects the present. Even the Bible tells us that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons. These "men" who have attacked her have never walked in her shoes and never will. The most important questions to be asked her as she progresses to the Supreme Court are how her life experiences have affected her definiition of justice and fairness!

I wish her well as do others in my generation who have experienced racism and sexism, overt and covert, and who have survived. True, we have seen some changes but we also know that those changes were slow to come and hard to keep.


jmp/5/58/09

Hillbillies Are Who We Are!

"You're no hillbilly!" That's a phrase I have heard many times mostly in the context of a snide, negative, derogatory slam. One day I even looked up the term in my trusty Encarta dictionary. That definition was so insulting, biased, and off the wall that I reached for my Roget's Original Thesaurus (the old one that is almost impossible to find anymore). That definition was infinitely more acceptable but still not quite precise enough for me. In a graduate school creative writing seminar a few years ago, I was asked to state my cultural origins and how that affected my writing. My answer was simple, I AM BLACK APPALACHIAN!

Every member of the seminar wanted to challenge my personal assessment. They couldn't hear the Appalachian dialect in my speech (that's because the seminar participants didn't really know what to listen for). There were no black people in Appalachia! I would love to have been an observer in a classroom at Kent State University when a certain professor of African-American studies made that particular pronouncement in front of my daughter. By the time she had to repeat her answer to a professor of ethnic studies at a major southern university, she could name ancestors back to the late 18th Century. Whether she recognized it or not, the fact was that Dori could immediately refute the often misstated fact that black people do not know the history of our families. We know more that we usually talk about...someone in our family or extended family knows.

Our family's Appalachian heritage began in Virginia around the time of the Revolutionary War. My mother's great-great grandfather settled in the Shenandoah Valley at the end of that war on land originally surveyed by George Washington. His life could not have been easy, he had to farm the land to support his family. His son, my mother's great grandfather also farmed the land. There is no record (in the Virginia historical archives) that I have been able to find that says he ever owned a slave (or married for that fact) but there is a record that he filed papers insuring the freedom (from slavery) of his only son, my greatgrandfather.

According my grandfather, the family lived and worked together for many years until shortly after the end of the Civil War. The old man called his son in and said simply , "I'm getting older and soon I will die. I don't want to send you away but it is time for you to take your family and leave here. This is your home but the rest of my family will never let you keep it when I'm gone." The son was apparently given a wagon, mules, farm tools, and a sum of money to buy land across the mountains. My great grandfather, his wife and five of their six children left Virginia. My best guess is that they followed what became known as the Midland Trail across West Virginia. My brother's research said that the family spent a year working somewhere along the St. Mary's River in West Virginia before they travel on to where our family lived on the Kentucky-West Virginia border. The family homeplace where my mother and her siblings were all born was actually the second piece of property the family owned in West Virginia.

Again, the family farmed the homeplace. William Henry, my great grandfather, built his home at the head of the holler (yes, I said holler, not hollow) where the family lived. He also built a schoolhouse and gathered his (black) neighbors together to hire a teacher. He was determined that his family would have an education (maybe because he had to sneak across the mountain to a Quaker lady who taught him to read the Bible!) That schoolhouse had as its first teacher, my grandmother, Mary, and as the last teacher my mother, Elsie. Each succeeding generation inherited fortitude, willingness to work hard, educational direction and a desire for a better life from the elders. We also inherited a strong sense of family. Today we are scattered across the country and involved in all kinds of professions and endeavors. Some are business people, doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, teachers, construction/building trades workers, military, government workers, scientists...etc.

Oh yes, all of us are of Appalachian heritage. If that makes us hillbillies...so be it! We are who we are.

Sunday Morning Memories

Sunday morning! Got to get up early before the family is afoot. Slip down the stairs, cut through the kitchen and out the back door. Whistle for the dog and she comes running from her cozy nest of straw beneath the tool shed. Scratch her neck and behind her floppy ears as I watch her dance expectantly..waiting to see what I have hidden in my pocket. Do I in fact have something..of course...she smells the dog biscuits I bought at Ailiff's store yesterday.


"You coming back soon?" comes the voice of my father from the back door. I nod a yes answer and then quietly add, "Going to walk across the hill to the Billups Gap, then walk back to town across Water Tower Hill until I get to Moore's pine woods. Probably will stop to see if the wild strawberry patches are still there." The old man tosses a woven peck basket to me. The unspoken message is clear. If there are any strawberries left in my favorite patches, bring some back!

Off I go with Brandy the beagle following close behind. I carry a tall walking stick..not to help me climb the hills...to use as a weapon if I should come across an unfriendly snake...two legged or no legged. Brandy runs from place to place sniffing the ground, When she catches the spoor of a rabbitt, her tail wags back and forth and she looks to me for permission to track the animal. " No girl, not today. Today is a day to go walking...not hunting." I breath deeply. The air smells clean and fresh. Off in the far distance, there is the smell of a skunk...barely touching the air. I follow the dirt road to the shortcut between the sides of the switchback and then take the deer path to the top of the mountain.

The old schoolhouse still stands but the windows are broken out and the padlock on the door has been busted off. One of the student privies behind the school house has been knocked over but the other one still stands. I cut through the damp broom sage to the gate of the cemetery where generations of my family sleep in eternal peace. My mother lies here under the cedar tree that my father and I had planted. I notice that it has grown tall and now shades half her grave. Down the hill and slightly to the left of where my mother lies are the resting places of my great-grandparents, the former slaves who moved the family from western Virginia to the West Virginia/Kentucky border. They are surrounded by other relatives whose names I barely know.

Brandy sits down and looks at me as if to say, "Aren't we going any farther, is this the end of our walk?" Again, I scratch her ears and turn toward the gate. We walk back toward the schoolhouse and the dirt road that parallels the fence. The trail is familiar, the road is old but passable. Few vehicles travel this road, few people even know it exists. The families that originally homesteaded this area have died out and moved on. The Census says Cassville has 700-800 people but most of us who grew up here figure the count was taken on a Sunday when the relatives from out of town were visiting. On top of the ridge that turns toward the Billups Gap, the dirt road shifts from yellow clay to a mixture of clay and sand. The surrounding land is flat now and for many years, since my childhood, has been used to grow hay. The old hay barn is still standing in the middle of the field. My friends and I used to meet there on Sunday afternoon, jump in the hay, throw hay at each other and play hide and seek. If I close my eyes and invoke the memories, I can still hear our playful laughter echoing through the hills. Those days are gone now and thre Gap is silent except for the birdsong of the cardinals and the bob whites.

My visit to the Gap is over and I head to the western part of the ridge and Water Tower Hill. The deer paths make walking fairly easy and Brandy constantly sniffs different places. She never strays far from me and I do not deviate from the trail until I get to the edge of Moore's pine forest. Twice in my childhood, the Moore family had sold timber from their land..but the trees have regrown since the last time they were cut. I am glad that the pines are still there. There is something very refreshing about the smell of pine needles and pine resin . I remember my grandmother telling me that the air in the pine woods was good for people with lung problems. I suppose that this is true but on the other hand, I lived all my young life on the edge of this forest. Finally I find the path that leads down the mountain toward my uncle's alfalfa field.
The wild strawberry patches are at the foot of the mountain about fifty feet from the edge of the pine forest near the site of Miss Virginia Moore's old house. There I will stop and pick enough berries to fill my peck basket. If I can't fill the basket here, there is another patch across the creek from the alfalfa field. I have never told anyone where my secret patches are and I am happy to find them still loaded with fruit although I am not happy to see the three foot long black snake slithering down the creek bank. Brandy barks at the snake from the safety of my side The critter ignores both of us.

Church bells are ringing now. First comes the Methodist church only to be answered by the peal of the Baptist church a half block down the street. By the time their bells are silent, the Methodist church on the Kentucky side of the river begins to play its chimes. By the time the chimes start, I am walking back in my father's door with a full basket of berries. The walking stick leans against the branches of the holly tree and the dog is drinking water from the rain barrel. Thirty minutes later, my 70 VW beetle is headed north on US 23 toward the Ohio River. Sunday mornng is in motion and I have to be at work in northern Ohio the next day.

Over My Shoulders

There isn't a single day when I wake up without thinking of my female elders and wondering what their view of the current world would be. First there is my mother, a lady born in the end of the 19th Century, who would be absolutely stunned by modern communication tools. For instance, I left the house a few minutes ago and headed to my favorite book store. I love that place because I can buy bestsellers of a few years past for between one dollar and three dollars. Please not that I am talking about hardbound books, not paperbacks. As I was scanning the shelves for authors who interest me, an electronic chime goes off in my pocket. Naturally my sons are trying to find me since I left the house and told no one but the dog where I was going. I answer the flip phone and reassure my family that no, I am neither lost, kidnapped, or suddenly afflicted with Alzheimers disease and I will be home LATER. The phone alone would have shocked my mother...after all she lived in our holler all of her life and there was only one phone in its mile and a half stretch. That phone was in our house because my father worked for the electric company and he was on call 24 hours a day. The idea of a wireless phone in my pocket no bigger than a bar of soap would have been beyond her belief.

I leave the book store with my purchases in a broadcloth shopping bag. Don't think Mama would have been so bothered with the bag but I can only imagine the shock on her face when I push a button in my pocket to unlock the doors of my TRUCK! The electronic key would have been surprising but somehow I think she would have been bothered to see a woman driving a vehicle that could only be described as a truck (my Honda CRV). After all ...Daddy drove a truck, my uncles drove a truck, but women in the 1940's did not drive trucks...they rode while the men drove. In those years, there were a few families in the mountains that still traveled in horse drawn wagons.
My mother died in 1945 and time marched on. The one room schoolhouse where she taught faithfully for so many years has long since been destroyed by vandals who had no respect for the history of the physical building or of the family that built it. I salvaged some of the books from the schoolhouse and some of her other books that discussed curriculum and methods of her times. It is my personal way of touching her memory because I don't even own a picture of her except in my thoughts and dreams.
Life was simpler in my mother's time and families were closer together. That family closeness was a strong survival tool. I sincerely hope the current generation of family adapts the new technology to maintain that closeness. I have rambled enough for today...I will add nore thoughts soime other day.


jmp, 5/23/09