I’m not writing so much about “Genealogy” today, but I am
writing about our ancestors, how they survived their hard rough life, and how I
honor them in this day and time.
I saw the first
orange leaf on my maple tree out front yesterday. Fall is coming to my space, here on the edge
of the Blue Ridge
Mountains. In a few
more weeks the hills will be flowing with yellows, oranges, and browns. The mountains will look as if a piece of
colorful fabric had been thrown over them like a warm snuggie. All the instincts of mankind will plug in,
and storing up, packing in, drying, canning, preserving of every kind will kick
in. We will be lining our nests,
hunkering down in our best survival mode, to outwit the cold hard winter.
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| FALL GLORY |
All the summer goodies in the local farmer’s market, the peaches,
tomatoes, squashes, beans and peas are mostly cleared out now, taken home to be
preserved by canning or freezing. They’ll be replaced with the treasures of
fall: cider and apples from the mountains, collards, cabbages, broccoli, onions, winter
squash. In my garden, I have had
cabbages, onions, and collards, last way into the early spring, covered often
by the snow. Nothing is prettier than
green scallions peeking through the white snow.
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| SUMMER'S HARVEST |
All this is fun, but it brings to mind the plight of our
ancestors. If they had not done all this,
they would have starved during the cold winter.
It was not a matter of “hobby,” or “crafting,” or a “fun” afternoon for
them. It was a matter of survival! I've written before about the Leather
Britches Beans from the Foxfire books 3, (see blog IN PRAISE OF WOMEN, July
10.) If they had not canned enough vegetables,
dried enough fruits, preserved enough meat, salted enough fish, stored enough
potatoes, yams, turnips, cabbages, etc., in their “root cellar,” their children
would have gone hungry. If they had not
put by enough grains of wheat, or dried enough corn kernels to take to the
miller to be ground, there would have been no bread.
Think about this for a minute. This is such a foreign concept to us that we
can hardly wrap our minds around it.
There is no huge
supermarket a few blocks down the street (or even in
the STATE!) there is no “jiffy mart” around the corner where you can
send someone for a loaf of bread. The preserved meat is long gone, and the dried corn has just
run out. It is a cold March. What
would you do?
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| SNOW STORM 5 |
I often think about the isolated farmer’s wives, and the women in the hidden valleys of the mountains, way back in the hollers. Their whole existence was about surviving, keeping their
Of course it would have been different for the city people, the folks who lived in towns, and had town jobs. Ideally they would have had their salary all year. But bad weather, blizzards, etc., could have put a crimp in their survival also. There were no paid “sick” days. If the business had to close for some reason, there was no pay. Heating fuel, whether wood or oil, was needed in abundance in the northern part of the country. If food was not grown nearby, or in that season, or the crop had failed, it was not available. City wives would have had to preserve and can, and “put by” for the winter also.
And always lurking around the corner, hiding in some deep, dark crevasse was disease, ready to pounce on the unexpecting, the weak and malnourished. You couldn’t run out and get a
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| Asphidity Bag |
flu shot at Walgreens, or an antibiotic from the local
doctor. You suffered through it with
your hot “toddy” and your mustard plaster or onion poultice. Or maybe your grandma made an Asphidity
bag 4 to tie around
your neck to keep away colds, flu, and congestion.
To me it seems a horrifying existence. And I would not have wanted to live in that
period, or under those circumstances.
All of our ancestors endured problems like this. They seemed to have found a way to survive,
because we are here! They were brave and resourceful people. Give them the honor and respect they all
deserve
Survive, remember, and honor
1. Recipe for fermented pickles – see next page – Announcements,
Info, and Incidentals.
2. Recipe for Shirley’s Apple butter – see next page – Announcements,
3.FOXFIRE BOOKS: (Edited by Eliot Wigginton. Published by Anchor Press, the first editions in 1972, 1973 and 1975) In the early 1970s a high school in Rabun Gap, Georgia, right in the heart of the high mountain counties of Macon (NC) Habersham and Rabun (SC) decided that all the mountain lore of that region, all the knowledge of how to exist in that extreme environment, which was stored in the brains of the old inhabitants of that land, needed to be captured before they were all gone. And the current young people needed to know what had gone before them. So for years, they assigned the students the job of interviewing those old mountain people, starting out with their own families. They went up into the hills searching out what people knew and writing it down. Sometimes they used audio media to capture the sound of these folks telling their own stories. Eventually there were 12 books. It is a marvelous set of books, stories about the ones who came before us. You might find one in your library.
I see them still available on EBay and Amazon.
I see them still available on EBay and Amazon.
4. An Asphidity bag was a folk remedy most commonly found in the Appalachian Mountains and the south in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were also used by the Cherokee Indians. Usually, it was a tiny bag of very smelly herbs, often including garlic, ginseng, pokeweed, goldenseal, and yellow root. However, the exact recipe varied by the maker. The vapors were supposed to ward off colds, flu, or other diseases. It was often said that the disease was warded off because no one would (or could) come near you!
http://pics.davesgarden.com/pics/2008/02/18/Sharran/6dfee6.jpg
5. http://media.photobucket.com
Other photos are possessions of the writer.
Other photos are possessions of the writer.
