Thankful for a beautiful sunrise.
Yesterday I was missing those holidays with my my dad’s family at my great aunts’ farm in Kentucky. There was no TV, no cell phones, no toys, no games. There was no running water and no indoor plumbing.
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Water came from a farm pump on the back porch. The outhouse was in the chicken yard. Heat was dependent on how much coal you shoveled into the grated fireplaces. You ate. You talked to the relatives and ate again. You fell asleep, woke up, talked and then ate more.
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Oh, the stories! The aunts had a bottomless supply of stories. Stories about wild men who ran liquor down the Ohio river at the edge of our bottom land. Rumors and gossip about neighbors who ran off with one another years ago. There were sworn sightings of visitations from ghosts and evil spirits.
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Stories about crazy people and family valor passed down from the war. The Civil War. Petty feuds lasting over 100 years when the hated neighbors “walked the land when your great granddaddy died thinking they’d get it. Twasn’s no way that would happen, those skunks.” I soaked it in, eyes big and dark like blackberry pancakes.
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The aunts were overjoyed to see us. They had cooked for days and anxiously awaited our arrival. They made sure they had new batteries for their hearing aids and store bought toilet paper in the outhouse. We were the beloved. And it radiated from them the moment we turned the corner of the dirt road and saw them waving at us as we approached the Farm. Their love was palatable.
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Here is a quick story that is so representative of my family that I had to share it. Long ago in what now seems like a society on a different planet, my sister was invited to join the DAR. This was in the 1960’s. My mother was horrified as was my radical sister. Mom was a bit of a radical herself and although she politely declined the offer, her disdain for the whole idea was something you could practically chew.
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Mom told the DAR story one Thanksgiving when we were visiting the Farm for the holidays. My grandmother Mackey listened and then, with an audible sniff, shook her head. “Latecomers,” she said with a frown. “Our family came over way before those DAR people. We were here before Jamestown, before the Mayflower, working with the Indian folk when those other folks were still getting the money together for ships.”
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This is 100% the way of my people. Let’s one-up the Mayflower. Priceless. Did they know how to tell a story or what? Now I wonder when our family did end up in America. I think someone mentioned we came over in the 10th century as the wild indentured servants of the Norse. But there’s no one left for me to ask. I regret that I’ll never hear the stories passed down from that period.
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