FALL COMES ON

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

FALL GLORY

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.

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.

SUMMER'S HARVEST

All summer I have brought in the luscious yellow peaches grown just ten miles down the road in South Carolina.  I slice them, sugar them, let them sit a while to make sweet pink juice, and then bag them in single servings for the freezer.  I have done the same with straw-berries and blueberries grown on this same farm.  These beautiful fruits have not come 2000 miles on a refrigerated train.  The strawberries do not have hard white centers.  The peaches drip juice all over you when you eat them.  I have put up fig preserves from the fig trees growing all around this same farmer’s market building.  I can have “fresh” fruit all winter long, until the new crop comes in next summer.  I have canned tomatoes, salsa, and spaghetti sauce.  I have made peach jam and dill pickles.¹  I ferment my pickles in a crock, and then put them up in glass jars in my fridge.  I have some there now, from last year, still perfect.  I will soon make new apple butter², aromatic with cinnamon and cloves (oh the house smells so good on that day.)  I am waiting for the house temperature to drop down to about 65 – 70 degrees to make my sour kraut.  Did you see my blog of August 7  The Kraut Barrel?   I’m waiting to see who of you will join me in this new adventure.  Read The Kraut Barrel  and then go out and buy a cabbage.  We will do this together.  Let me know how it goes. Come back to me on the “COMMENTS” block at the bottom of each blog

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 

SNOW STORM  ⁵

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? 

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 children alive. And the man of the home - it was his duty to protect his family.  He has done the best that he could, worked beyond imagining, and it has gone awry, they have run out of food!  How does he cope, what does he do?  

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  

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,

        Info, and Incidentals.

^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.

 ^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.