An Attitude of Gratitude

Who’d have ever thunk it: Richard accepting a social invitation that excluded me? He was so unprepared that he told the caller that he and I had gardening to do this evening. I reminded him that a wise man I know had once admonished me that I should never decline social invitations in order to take care of our home. The wise man (named Richard) said, “We’re not here for the house; the house is here for us.” Ditto that for “our” garden on Mamie’s land.

Richard went fishing with his friend while I went to work. Mamie and I regularly give each other a hard time. She has told me more than once that since I travel without Richard, if she was younger she’d have already stolen my man. Mamie regularly tells people that every time there’s gardening to be done, I send Richard to do it while I disappear to Atlanta, Louisiana, or the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I told her to mark the date on her calendar as the day I came to work the garden while Richard went to play.

My father’s mother was already recruiting us to attend her hundredth birthday bash when she died at the age of ninety-six and a half. I keep reminding Mamie that I expect her to live to see her hundredth birthday so that I can help throw her the party we never got to give our grandma. I tell her that the reason we feed her is to keep her healthy until she reaches the century mark. I even tell her that’s why we’re gardening on her ground.

The truth is that Mamie is a person who, in Richard’s words, “will be pleased.” It’s a delight to hear her talk about the pleasure she gets from her garden. She recently told me that she wouldn’t care if she never got to eat one bite out of the garden we’re growing, she just loves to see it grow. She likes to go out, and lovingly look at it, and comment on how beautiful it is with its nice straight rows -- thanks to Richard’s scientific side. And she’s positively poetic about keeping caught up with the weeding.

More than one plant has had to be moved because I didn’t consult Mamie before planting, but she also freely admits that she’s still learning after over three quarters of a century at this game. Some squashes get too chummy with their neighbors and start inter-breeding, so they have to be separated to succeed. There are plants that have to be planted in certain places to keep them from her chickens and others that need certain soil conditions. And who knew that butternut squash needed twenty-five feet to run around in?

I’ve read a lot of garden lore in books, but unless you talk to the farmer who gardened your land before you did, there’s a lot of trial and error that still has to happen. Mamie may be saving me from some of the trial and error, and she’s a lot more interesting than any gardening book.

Managing Memories

All change seems to send me into a cycle of grieving; I’m the only person I know who can grieve over a dead tree. Right now, I’m grieving over what I bought to be my lifeline to all of our old world after we lost our home and everything in it to Hurricane Katrina. We lived without a physical address for nine months while I kept current and connected to those people and places we love with my new, first-ever, sleek, silver laptop computer.

That computer has been my almost constant companion into which I’ve poured my soul when no one else could bear to listen. It’s been rattling and wheezing for some time, so I have backed all the information up to an external memory -- much like I’m attempting to have Mamie download her ninety years of memories into my mind.

My silver soul mate is now unable to access any of the stored information. I know I need to find a replacement, but there’s not only the decision of what new machine would best suit my needs; there’s always a learning curve to overcome. I’m just not yet ready to learn the ways of a new partner in prose. What kind of nutbag do you have to be to grieve over a computer?

I think I’ve been sent to Coker Creek to make peace with the cycles of nature: creation, gestation, birth, production, reproduction, decay, dormancy, and rebirth. If there’s one thing that I desperately want to learn from my mountain mama, it’s how to get over grief.

She left her whole family and her home state when she eloped with the love-of-her-life at the ripe old age of fourteen. It was two years and the birth of a grandchild before she dared go back to face her father. She made a lovely life for herself in her husband’s home state, and has many awards to show for the success of her endeavors.

It’s not as if she didn’t have challenges to face; it simply seems that she took each challenge to be another adventure in education. She was the oldest of five daughters; don’t you know how desperately she must have missed her mama and sisters before the days of nearly-free long distance telephone calls? Maybe that’s why she began assisting her new postmaster father-in-law at the local post office; she could get her letters from home as soon as they hit the counter. She and at least one of her sisters still write regularly to one another.

Mamie was showing me some of her citations and happened upon her penmanship primers from when she was ten years old. She said, “I’ve been told that I have nice handwriting. Here’s the books I used to teach myself. They gave them to us at school, and I just took an interest.” Obviously, her interest paid off; Mamie has beautiful penmanship and quite a way with words. Anyone lucky enough to correspond with Mamie is indeed luck enough.

We’ve gotten into the habit of visiting her past for a bit every time I stop in; then she accompanies me to the garden whenever she feels up to the task. There, she shows me how to plant the future in foods and handle a hoe to ensure that the wonderful exceeds the weeds.

Most Amazing Mamie

Mamie is the most amazing worker I’ve ever seen. I went to plant sweet potato sets that she insisted needed immediate attention two days ago. Our weather has been so humid that you could ring sweat out of your ponytail after half an hour outside, but this doesn’t deter Mamie. I couldn’t locate her two days ago because she had gone to Tellico on errands, so by the time I caught up with her yesterday she was raring to go to the garden.

Mamie had said that the carrots, beets and already spouted potato plants could use a bit more mounding of dirt around their foliage.
Before proceeding to plant, I figured that I should mind the maintenance of our other root crops.

As I tended to the rows of carrots and red and white potatoes, she set to killing potato and bean beetles. She loves killing weeds and bugs, which I think is a good way to work through life’s frustrations. If you gotta kill something, a bean beetle is a good place to begin.

Sometimes, Mamie drives down to the garden, but this time she had walked, which meant that she didn’t even have a cup of water with her. She had also neglected to put on her sun hat, but she wouldn’t be convinced to take a break to go get these things. She hoed up one row and down another until she was satisfied that the weeds wouldn’t win the day.

After we finished the upper garden, I set my sights to the lower area which Richard had finished harrowing in preparation for sweet potatoes and a second planting of corn. Next thing I knew, Mamie had been to the house to get the seed corn and was beside me planting the potatoes.

By this time, I had taken a couple of shade breaks, but Mamie just wouldn’t stop or sit. As we worked together, she entertained me with lessons she’s learned in seventy-six years of gardening in the same ground. I keep telling her that she’s got a lot more to teach me, so she’d better slow down. After all, she is the woman who has said for two years that she’s too old to tend a garden. She just laughs and says that she lies a lot. She also says that this is her last year of tending egg layers, but I suspect this is another of her “lies.”

I finally got her to agree to let me cover the potato plants and offered to walk her back to the house. She insisted that she could walk unaided. I kept looking over at Mamie as I worked; she was bending to pull weeds and hoeing another row. At long last, she stopped long enough to ask me if I’d drive her home. She promised to sit down and rehydrate herself.

Less than an hour later, as I arrived at her back door to put away the tools, here came Wonder Woman with a box of matches. “Don’t you just love to rest a little bit and then come out to do more work? I think I’ll go burn my trash pile,” she announced.

All I could think of was a nice long shower and an evening on the couch. They just don’t make mamas like Mamie any more.

Buffet Blunders

The Ruritan supper was a lot of fun;
I set the buffet up wrong before we’d begun.
The people who usually do the set-up
Must have trusted that I wouldn’t mess up.
But they really erred in this assumption;
I often have less knowledge than gumption.

If something needs doing, I just jump in and do.
The messes I’ve gotten into are more than a few.
The burgers were where the greens should be;
The coffee resembled a pot of hot tea;
I didn’t know where to find the drinks.
Being new on the job without a boss really stinks.

I almost never pay close enough attention
Unless I hear my responsibilities mentioned.
By the time Greta arrived with her expertise
It was too late to make changes, to say the least.
I can follow the old ways when I know what they are,
But the people who teach them better not stray too far.

I always seem to see things a little askew,
But for almost sixty years it’s gotten me through.
Next time I may arrive fashionably late,
Or maybe I’ll develop the patience to wait.
Or maybe the folks who like things just so
Will know better than to let me run the show.

Appalachian Americana

We took a day trip to The Museum of Appalachia, which I had become aware of on my last trip to Kentucky. It was a pleasant drive of a little over two hours back to a 3-D set of “snapshots” of the history of the area we now consider home.
Very little distance from I-75, we turned into a full frontier village, surrounded by the obligatory split-rail fence. The founder of this wonderful trek back in time must really love the people and places who have shared his life. This feeling permeates everything as you walk the paths of the rural mountain village of thirty-five original log cabins and buildings.

Richard is a reader for reference; while I’m an overview sort of sightseer. Before entering any place of historical significance, we have to agree on our approach. If it were up to Richard, we would never see more than one room of any museum. I, on the other hand, like to do the once-over and, if we like what we see, come back for more. Especially in light of this museum’s close proximity to our home, we agreed on the quick and dirty approach before beginning.

Even though the museum is not, strictly speaking, a living history museum, the approach that Mr. Irwin takes in arranging the displays brings the history very much alive. Mr. Irwin, quite obviously, knew many of the people in the pictures. Many of the descriptions of people and things were written in Mr. Irwin’s own hand. You don’t get much more personal than that.

Of great interest to Richard was the “perpetual motion machine” on display in the Appalachian Hall of Fame. Also housed here was a rocking chair made completely of mule shoes which greatly amused me. The whole village was filled with equal parts history and whimsy.

There are many parts of the museum which are very much alive. We were thrilled to come upon the source of the sounds of screeching coming across the greens in the bodies of a peacock family comprised of a mama teaching her babies to forage while her mate displayed his manly evil-eye feathered tail. His strutting of his stuff put me in mind of the war bonnets worn by the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans. We were also very interested in the vegetables growing in their gardens and nicely entertained by the musicians pickin’ on the porch.

Unlike the feeling I get in many museums that the important things are the materials on display, I left the Museum of Appalachia with a feeling that I had been introduced to many people, important because they had helped shape this area -- some by simply being themselves in a one-room cabin or cave.
We vowed to come back with Mamie and Jack, who still live much of the pioneer lifestyle depicted here. The insights they can add, we’re sure, will bring another whole dimension to our next tour.

We were feeling such a part of Americana, that we topped our visit off with apple pie ala mode and hot fudge sundae’s at Shoney’s, another slice of old-time America.

Saturday Sessions at the Saloon

I know that a saloon is supposed to serve liquor,
But at Charlie and Deborah’s they don’t.
The musicians and groupies couldn’t pack in thicker;
At least, we always think that they won’t.

But people keep coming from so many miles around
To share bluegrass music and laughter.
It’s an original Appalachian mountain sound
With playing by newbies and masters.

There’s lots of music for making even grown men cry;
There’s gospel and faith music too.
There’s original music to give it a try
With a welcoming audience and volunteer crew.

The food is fabulous, brought by players and fans
Who seem to all be very good cooks.
Deborah and I are now formulating future plans
For their recipes to be a book.

Charlie on stand-up bass is a grand sight to behold,
But we all clamor for him to drum.
I don’t know about his performance, in days of old,
But he plays now without any rum.

An occasional buck dancer or happy clogger
Joins in with a quick dance or a jig.
There’s lots of material to use as a blogger
At Coker Creek Saloon’s Bluegrass gigs.

A Perfect Place

We enjoy good clean drinking water
Flowing out of our underground springs,
And lots of rainwater for washing.
There’s wood for burning in great supply
Because all things eventually die.

Our home is shaded by wooded hills;
Our crops rarely require watering.
Our clay soil holds onto moisture
With a blanket of leaves from our trees.
Our land supplies most of our needs.

What we cannot grow and cannot make
Our neighbors are willing barter.
There are still some hunters and trappers
To trade game for a few chicken legs.
And there are always the chickens’ eggs.

Just as the natives found that they had
A metal of enduring value
That could be traded for outside goods,
The gold that’s found in our many streams
Is another source of trading means.

The people who settled this mountain
Surely picked a secluded enclave.
If we wanted to be in hiding,
And drop out of the outside rat race,
Coker Creek would be the perfect place.