Found It!

'Fraid I don't have anything to add to what Murphy's Law, Old NFO, Jay G, or anyone else who posted about Saturday had to say.  Except that somebody must have measured my hand.  And then made me sad.  Because there was this at that little gun show:

Smith and Wesson series 60 .357 magnum.  It fit like it had been made especially for me. But its price tag didn't fit nearly as well - $690.  And then there was a Kahr 9 mm that didn't have as much personality but, again, fit my hand like it was made for me.  I don't need a 9 mm.  But talk about yer perfect concealed carry for a person with small hands...

And dinner oh yeah.  Mudbugs are good no matter how you serve them and those were the best hush-puppies I have ever had.  Not to mention some of the best stories I've ever heard.  There was the one about the naked...well, never mind.  You want to hear it you gotta come to the next gathering.

And the whole thing inspired me to try to start getting the laundry room where my reloading set up languishes back into a functional state.  I made some loads and shot them and then there was that phone call in the wee hours of February 10, 2013, and it's like I got totally distracted and it sat.  But in the middle of the rearranging I came across a couple small boxes that I had never really paid attention to.  Well.

A million years ago I stretched out in Grandma's porch swing and read the books she read and carried with her when she "went to housekeeping" and the books "the boys" accumulated when they still lived at home.  The likes of Penrod and Sam and Chicken Every Sunday, both of which now live with me.  And there was another book, a book whose title I couldn't remember.  A book of poetry:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward.
All in the Valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

And:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

I didn't know about the stupidity of Crimean War commanders or the myth of the Noble Redman then.  The summer bees sang in the green warmth of a mountain farm well off the paved road as the chickens clucked and scratched contentedly in the bushes and the cushions smelled of coal smoke and dust and the swing moved lazily with a push of my foot against the chain and I read the verses year after year after year until I knew some of them by heart.  And then I was grown up and Grandma was gone and, when I poked through the bookshelf when we went to close the farm, so was the book of poems.  Sigh.  So in recent years I've poked about the internet and through shelves of books in antique stores, hampered by the fact that I was looking for a book whose title I couldn't remember.

And then there was this little box with stuff from Mom's house that I hadn't actually looked in.

Damn.  It was on my parent's bookshelf and then in my own laundry room all those years.  It has gotten too fragile to really read, but it lives in a safe and cherished place now.

And then there was stuff like:

A little research showed me why I have no memory of this - the S 200 S stove required its own gas tank and it was a long time ago.  Not useful. I just wonder who gave it to me.

So now the laundry room is only half done and I've wandered off to watch "Survivorman", leaving various boxes strung around the TV room. Maybe the upcoming weather will encourage me to go back to work.  I'm so easily distracted but it's pretty much guaranteed that I'm going to be stuck inside.

And the air pressure readings over in the Pacific say we've got at least 2 more major storms coming over the next 2 weeks.

Ah, Memories

You know how your mind wanders from one thing to another.  I was thinking about the Maryland weather post while doing the office commute, with certain memories standing out.

First, there was Hurricane Agnes in 1972.  It was a tropical storm by the time it got to us, but it dropped a boatload of rain.  We didn't have any streams around but clogged culverts, the topography, and railroad tracks on a raised bed that bordered one side of the community turned us into a lake.  Somewhere I have pictures of folks canoeing between the trees in the park.  And of a mostly submerged "No Parking" sign on Railroad Street.

For years we had visited Great Falls NP on Sunday afternoons, enjoying the walk as a family and finding the woods and river a relief from sultry D.C. area summer days.  The gullies and gaps on the trail to the Falls were bridged by old wooden walkways that had been there for goodness how long.  Finally, the NPS spent a gazillion dollars worth of tax money to replace the old wooden walks with concrete bridges with iron railings.  Spiffy.

And within months, Agnes arrived and demonstrated that whoever designed and OKed those new bridges had failed to take into account a very important characteristic of rivers - hydrology.  It rained and rained and the feeder streams poured more and more water into the Potomac drainage basin and that water headed downstream just loaded with tons and tons of debris.

When it got to those nice new bridges in the gorge the debris was pushed up against the railings and the force of the water behind it just scoured those new bridges out, tossing them aside as it rampaged to the Bay.  It was  a decade before the Maryland side of the Falls was accessible again.  This time, they built bridges with removable iron railings. 

Then there was the President's Day snow of 1979.  Major weather model fail.  I woke up in a dark bedroom. Looked at my clock - way too late to still be so dark.  Went to the window.  It was dark because nearly 2 feet of unexpected snow was piled on the roof, blocking the windows.

February, 1983.  Another doozy around 2 feet.  Somebody had gotten out with 4WD and that night I took a walk, following the track.  It was eery - dark, nobody out, no traffic sounds.  Just the hiss of snow blowing across the drifts.  I walked down to the main road, which was littered with lumps with aerials sticking out, buried cars abandoned in the road  and scattered every which way.  It started niggling at me that I was hearing a "tick".  Then silence.  Then "tick".  Took a minute for me to realize that what I was hearing was the traffic light that was still cycling through the signals despite it looking like the end of the world and my being the only human being out as far as I could see.  For some reason that freaked me - I turned around and hustled home.

Then there was the Blizzard of '96.  The government had just reopened after a prolonged furlough when this one nailed us and shut us down for another couple weeks.  I hadn't been paying attention, just knew that some snow was predicted on Sunday.  Decided to go to Mass Saturday night so that I wouldn't have to deal with bad roads on Sunday.  Mass was crowded and began with the celebrant saying "So who here really wants 2 feet of snow tomorrow?" What?! TWO FEET?!  Miserable grocery and video store experiances followed Mass.  Except the part where I spotted the chocolate cake that none of the other locusts noticed.  Ha! Mine!  It was great fun for a few days.  The east was paralyzed but we had groceries so we'd get up in the morning, pull the sleep sofa out, crawl into it, and watch TV and videos. And just as the area was beginning to dig out another big snow hit.  Eventually I started putting on a back pack and trudging to a grocery store that was about a half mile away, although it took a while before they had much to select from.

The last serious snow memory is 2009-2010.  The Winter of Never Ending Snow. I invited family to have Christmas at my house that year because, in my words, "we never really get Winter until February".  Yeah.  December 18.  Nor'easter.  Fortunately, I didn't park in my garage - I parked in the front yard and tied a tarp over the suv.  I didn't get back into my driveway until mid-way through March.  That first snow was a 2 footer and it just went from there.  The normal approach up here is that the ATVers often have plow blades and they plow us out.  It was too deep.  My neighbor hired someone with a front end loader to clear his driveway and cut an acess path in my yard for my suv, using the top of my driveway to pile the snow.  Blizzard One - February 5-6.  Blizzard Two - February 9 - 10.  I had at least 6 feet of snow fall in my yard that season.  They finally sent the National Guard up with earth moving equipment to dig us out.  I ran out of places to shovel snow to - I couldn't toss it any higher and had to walk each shovelfull down the street to get rid of it.

I think I may finally be getting over that Winter now.  I didn't have a nervous breakdown when patterns earlier in the season reminded me of those of 2009.

Once Every 20 Years

Less four months.  You can't miss November 22's significance, no matter what you think of Kennedy - we have a tendency to commemorate in a big way in increments of 50 and 100 years.  I was thinking, though, that there's three moments in my almost 60 year- long-life that I clearly and distinctly remember where I was and what I was doing. Hence the "once every 20 years.

The first, of course, is the assassination of JFK.  I would have been 9 years old. We were on the school bus on the way home and the bus driver at some point said something to the effect of  "Well, President Kennedy was killed today."  Which silenced the bus load of kids pretty effectively.  I remember that as I got off the bus in front of the house, Mom was coming around from the clothes line with a basket of laundry and she was crying and then I knew it was true.  What I find interesting is that I have no memory of knowing who President Kennedy was.  Or even what a president was.  My memories of anything with "President Kennedy" attached start at that moment.  But I must have known or a sense of "It's true" wouldn't have been significant.

And then I remember sitting on the sofa with Mom and Dad and watching Ruby shoot Oswald live on TV and Dad said "Well, that's not going to help anything."  I count that day and the day of the actual assassination as one - they're sort of merged in together.

And then there was the shuttle Challenger disaster.  Oh, how I loved the idea of the shuttle program.  It wasn't deep space, and the ships were shaped wrong, but we were going back and forth into space and that was something I had dreamed of for at least since the first time I read The Wonderful Flight To The Mushroom Planet.   One of my coworkers would bring in a little black and white TV and at first a goodly number of the office would squeeze into his cubical to watch each launch.  Eventually the flights began to be routine and while Dixon would still watch each one most of us just went about our business.  Then one day he burst from his cubical - "The shuttle has exploded!"  And we pushed in and watched in horror - a horror not lessened by its playing out on a small black and white screen.

Finally, of course, there was 9/11.  I was teleworking, sitting at the dining room table, on the computer.  My daughter and I were IM-ing and I had to reboot the computer.  Whatever program we used for IM back in the day always popped up with a news headline when first opened.  I don't remember the exact wording of the headline, but I clicked on the link.  Only a single brief line about a plane flying into the World Trade Center.  Its brevity told me that little was known yet, and of course I assumed it was a small plane.  Wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened.   I'm not sure if I turned the TV on right then or if something about an update caused me to later on, but of course that was the end of work for the day.  And for several days after.  They closed the government and sent people home.  I was glad I had been teleworking - the sudden flood of people trying get home gridlocked the city and left thousands of people very vulnerable to any further attacks that might have come.  The folks who commuted by public transportation in particular - just because the government suddenly closes doesn't mean the train system has staff on hand to start running trains up the line. 

If I keep to the average there will be at least one more memory-searing day in my life. I'm not really looking forward to that.

Warm Memories of Cold

I don't like cold anymore.  In particular I don't like it when my hands, feet, and nose are cold when I'm in my own house.  But there's the power bill to think of, so I keep the thermostat down.  I'm just not very happy about it.

My memories of cold, cold mornings at Grandma's house 50 or so years ago and of waking up in Ikie's bed are far more pleasant.  Ikie was my Aunt Lillie, and I have no idea how a childish lisp turned Lillie to Ikie, but we kids all called her that.  I tried referring to her as Aunt Lillie when I thought I was too adult to use such a silly name as Ikie.  She was long gone by then, the victim of a car accident and a blood clot that stopped her heart when she was 41.  But "Aunt Lillie" just wasn't right - I went back to the Ikie of my memories.

Ikie sometimes had a room in town, leaving her room at the farm free for company.  When we were very small, Grandma's bed accommodated Grandma, my sister, myself, and two stuffed teddy bears that were nearly as big as we were.  But as we grew we spread out a little more, and while the living room sofa was acceptable, snagging Ikie's bed was best.

The farmhouse was old even then:  clapboard and plank with a tar paper roof and no such thing as insulation or thermo-pane windows in any part of its construction.  Ikie's room at the top of the stairs did have the advantage of having the rough stone kitchen chimney running through it, though.  The beds were not box springs and mattresses like my queen sized pillow top is now and age and use had caused every bed in the house to sag in the middle.  I would wake up down in the that valley in the middle of the mattress, buried under so many quilts that I could barely move, and with what little bit of me that remained exposed feeling frosted.  I would have to pee.  Desperately.  And it would be too bloody cold to want to get out of that bed to use the chamber pot.  Not to mention that that metal chamber pot would get doggone cold during the night.  So I'd hold it as long as I could while the rest of the house began to stir into the daily routine.  Grandma would be downstairs first, rattling the clinkers out of the stoves, loading them up with coal, and getting them firing again.  And I would wait as long as I could so that chimney in the room began to take the worst of the teeth out of the cold before scrambling out onto the wood floor and plunking my shivering self down on that cold enameled rim for blessed relief. 

By then the smells and sounds of  breakfast cooking would be drifting up.  I'd quickly dress and trot down to the kitchen that was dominated by the big coal stove, the stove from which so many wonderful things came:  fresh baked bread, roasted chickens, green beans full of bacon, mince pies.  And in the winter the most wonderful thing in the world came from it, baked on an old black griddle that was constantly being greased by a piece of fatback stuck on a fork that always lay on the top ledge on the stove.  Buckwheat cakes.  Properly made, properly sour buckwheat cakes.  You don't just mix up buckwheat batter.  As Uncle Lynn would say "You have to let it rot a bit before it's good."  Starter was carried over every day for the next day's batch, and Grandma knew how to let it rot just right.   Those cakes kept coming as long as you were willing to eat, topped with real butter - homemade and strongly flavored, not this weak stuff you get in the store - and a syrup that Grandma made out of a simple mixture of brown sugar and hot water.  On the side would be eggs and thick cut bacon and coarse sausage from her own hog, and thick slabs of the bread she made each week, thoroughly smeared with butter and jam.  Eating was serious business in that house.  None of that froo froo sugary cereal stuff that lines supermarket shelves.

There was one concession to modernity, however - Tang.   Good enough for the astronauts, it was good enough for us kids prepping for a day of playing army, scrambling through the woods, and harvesting icicles from the roof edge.

My bedroom isn't nearly as cold as Ikie's was those mornings.  I don't need as many blankets, my mattress doesn't sag in the middle, and I have three full bathrooms in the house.  But I wonder if I would notice the cold as much if I could wake up in Ikie's sagging bed, buried under Grandma's hand-made quilts.

Christmas

I'm not used to having company.  I am in particular not used to having more than one or two people at my house at one time.  So Christmas this year was an adventure.  It was also, despite the stress of getting the house ready, planning meals, wondering how to keep people who are used to way too much TV entertained without cable, etc., one of the most enjoyable Christmases I've had.

Granted, it is also only the third time in 21 years that I haven't had to drive to/from NC for Christmas - our folks had followed my sister down there when they retired in 1990.  I sure didn't miss sitting in traffic on US 95.  And being in NC never guaranteed good weather - in fact we got iced in once and last year got up the day after to find snow pounding down and 8 inches already on the ground.  I found it ironic that my new tire chains got their first use in NC rather than on my mountain in WV.  I know that my staying put meant others had to go through all the travel stresses, but I'm not feeling horribly guilty about it.

Dinner was yummy.  I had help - Angie at So Angelina's prepared the cheese manicotti, caponata, and Italian pound cake, and my daughter prepared the citrus green beans and the pumpkin-chai quickbread that we had for breakfast.  I highly recommend the quickbread paired with an apple compote parfait as a special breakfast - layers of homemade apple sauce, vanilla yogurt, and crunchy cinnamon-butter bread crumbs:

Mine wasn't so pretty, but it did the job.

Of course, the subject of Christmases past came up, favorite stories and reminisces, of fun events and of strange or hideous gifts that had to be greeted with faked enthusiasm.  Uncle Harold always gave us the most awful colored fuzzy slippers - I remember a bright lime green pair in particular.  And there was a seriously ugly pink and purple jacket that fortunately didn't fit me and had to be returned.  Not to mention Mom's ugly flower sweater phase.  But our favorite was the year Mom gave my sister and I matching necklaces.  It would have been around 1970, and we were teens and children of the 60s. Our parents were, um, sort of unaware.  My sister and I opened our boxes at the same time.  And immediately looked at each other.  Which was almost a mistake, because it made keeping a straight face really hard.  The necklaces were very pretty - Mom so admired the turquoise inlay over silver.  Buuuut... well, I can't find mine, but this is something like:

Yes, well.  I think we finally told her what it was many years later, to her horrified "I didn't know!".  My sister still has hers and I thought I had kept mine  - they were a source of much laughter for my sister and I.

Everybody had to leave by Monday morning.  And now I have a problem.  I have two new cookbooks...

...and I have to eat up leftovers before I can play with them.
...

It's A-comin'

Guess it could have been worse.  While I was grumbling about the rain last weekend, the higher elevations in the state were getting an early dose of winter.  Up to 9 inches of it.

I guess I'd better get under the house and fix the insulation.  Winter's a-comin'.

I'm not exactly ancient, but I have some memories of winter that are probably a bit unusual compared to those of my contemporaries.  We lived on Wilson Hill in the Settlement, and that old farmhouse sits so it gets hit with winds six ways from Sunday.   The house leaked air around the windows something fierce. I can remember watching the curtains move in the breeze - when the windows were closed.  And it's in the higher elevations of West Virginia, so winters can be a bit crisp and snowy.  No such thing as a heat pump or furnace - we depended on coal stoves for cooking and heating.  I love coal, love the smell of it burning, but it has the same disadvantage as wood - without regular stoking the fires go out at night.  And that house would get COLD.  So cold that the contents of the chamber pots under the beds would freeze.  At which point the beds were moved downstairs next to to one of the stoves for the winter.

I don't have backup heat other than a big kerosene heater right now.  It's on my "to do" list, but it's a part of the "to do" list that's expensive and so I'm saving for it.  Eventually a wood stove will go in downstairs.  I could probably find a source of coal, but wood is really more sensible here, and a coal fire gets black dust into everything, anyway.  But a part of me will always wish it was coal.

Reunion

As Irene ground her wet way up the east coast, four of us hillbilly descendents of E. Scott Felton, circuit judge, farmer, and great-(great)grandpa headed west to Preston County, WV.  Our destination was the Whetsell Settlement for the 90th annual Whetsell-Felton Reunion.

The Settlement is a farm community, the directions to which involve "turn off the paved road".  Sort of.  Repeated efforts to pave the road past a point have proved unable to withstand the winters and so eventually the pavement, such as it is, just peters out as you go up the mountain.  Then you just keep going until you reach Beatty Methodist Church and the grove across the road. 

If you don't have a higher riding vehicle I wouldn't recommend driving up into the Reunion Grounds. Just leave it at the church and haul the coolers over.

I don't remember when the pavilion was built.  I'm not sure why either - there's only been one day when it was wet enough to force a move to the Community Building down the road.  And I don't know what the arrangement is for use - the property technically belongs to the church.  Uncle Walter explained it to me a couple years ago but I can't remember stuff like that worth dooky.  All I know is that the reunion has been held there since 1923 so I guess it's been working out OK.

For several years a photographer was hired to take a group picture.  He used a panoramic camera that allowed Uncle Harold to be photographed at one end and then run around behind to appear at the other end of the group as well.  The last pic of that sort was taken in 1963, and I'm one of the kids seated in front.  I suspect I wasn't happy about it - we were probably dragged out of the woods for it.  This year a photographer came again.  Slightly more advanced technology.  But still difficult to corral the kids for a few minutes.

Come to think of it, the adults were as difficult to corral as the kids, 'cause we were HUNGRY.  And after we squirmed and shifted and said "cheese" for what seemed like the upteenth time we made a beeline for tables that are always amply loaded.  By the way, that lady in yellow sitting in the front row is 99 and perking along just fine. 

Yes, yes I did take antacid before heading out that morning.  Aunt Lottie's apple pies may be missed, but it's not like younger generations aren't stepping in to offer other options.  And the Russian contingent makes a mean pot of hot kielbasa and peppers!

We did have an unexpected guest who delighted kids and adults alike, but not as part of the menu.  Obviously a pet, and very tame and inquisitive.

There's a very important part of this reunion that hasn't been lost, thanks to people like my cousin Bud and my daughter.  We are a gathering of three specific lines who have been on the mountain for nearly 200 years - Feltons, Whetsells, and Calverts.

Bud gives a lesson every year, and every year we work on expanding what we know about the family histories.  Corrections are made, and now pictures are being added.

Seventeen year old Nathaniel Felton arrived from Great Yarmouth, England, in 1633 and eventually established his family in Salem, MA. His house and that of his son by the same name still stand in Peabody, MA, as part of the Brooksby Farm recreational area.  The family was prominent in the area - Nathaniel Felton, Jr. was one of many who protested the unjust accusations against their neighbor John Proctor during the Salem witchcraft trials.

 

The Felton family owned that property into the 1920s, and has left its name on the local geography in the form of Felton Hill. But at some time sons started moving south, probably along the King's Highway, and records start showing up of births and deaths in the Taneytown, MD, area in the mid 1700s. Then westward, where they settled for a time in the Ryan's Glen area in the western mountains of the state near what is now Oakland.  Finally, they settled at Whetsell, and there some stayed, leaving descendents who still reside on the property that is just over the hill behind the church.  Eventually, E. Scott, my paternal grandmother's father, arrived in the world in 1854, and when it came time to establish his own family he built one of several houses that have stood on the property.

His grand-daughter Gaye, a spry 93, still lives in the house today.

Eventually, a growing family required another house to be built - in 1909 the house that would become "Old Aunt Annie's Place" went up a little way over from "The Homeplace". Aunt Annie, spinster sister to E. Scott, was always Old Aunt Annie and lived out her very long life here (1874 - 1963), using an outhouse, carrying water from the spring up the hill, cooking and heating with coal and wood. The place now belongs to one of the family historians, Bud, her nephew, and he and wife keep it comfortable and welcoming.

 

The first Reunion was held here, under a favorite oak tree.

I can remember visiting Old Aunt Annie, sitting in front of her fireplace as she and Grandma chatted.  She had two pictures pinned over the mantle of what was then just an open fireplace:  Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.  She told me once that they were the two most brilliant men the country had ever produced.  Years later that is so intriguing, since several of her uncles served in the Army of the Potomac, seeing action in every major engagement including Antietam and Gettysburg.  Two were killed. One had safely served one hitch but was killed in battle after re-upping.  Another was too old, but dyed his hair and lied about his age in order to get in.  When his ruse was discovered he was allowed to serve on supply trains for the duration.  He was returning home after being mustered out when he was killed in a train accident. My grandmother remembered the stories her uncles who served and returned would tell her.

And no visit ends before a walk up to the place where I want to lay down at the end of what I hope will be a long life - the Felton family graveyard.

The first headstone there is 1844, but there is a row of stones that we believe are unmarked graves, so we don't know for sure if there are older graves than that.  The last burial was Uncle Worley, my grandmother's brother, in 1970. 

The last stop in the Settlement for the day is Grandma's house. It's the house where she and her new husband "went to housekeeping", as she used to say, in 1911, and it is a house full of memories. The property was sold after the last of my uncles died, and now largely serves as a deer cabin. For me, it's rather painful to return because without a full time resident time is clearly taking its toll on the old farmhouse.

So many memories, of sounds, smells, tastes.  The screen door slapping, the happy sound of the chickens pecking in the yard, the creak of the porch swing chain.  Coal smoke, fresh bread baking, Aunt Anne's stuffed cabbages cooking.  Buckwheat cakes, irony water from the spring, hot dogs roasted over the bonfire the night before reunion.  So many memories.

And then home after a long and tiring day.  This trip used to take 8 hours.  Now I can do it in 3 1/2, even with the winding roads off the interstate.  I'll be doing it again soon, probably, since I've taken on the responsibility of scanning the reunion ledger once this years entries are made.  But it's a pretty easy drive considering the roots the trip gifts me with.