It's been a very busy few weeks for me work-wise. A little busier than I'd prefer, but I make my hay while the sun is shining, as they say.
I had the opportunity to make more money today, but this promise I'd made to my dad and my uncle has been sitting on the back burner long enough, and a 70 degree day in February was not going to slip away from me.
I took them to lunch at the local barbecue joint. I knew I'd chosen the right day to do this when I bumped into a young relative of theirs who they've never even met. I introduced them, and they explained who they were and how the branches of the tree connected. They inquired about his granny, who was older than they were and who they had assumed had passed away without their hearing about it.
Turns out she was still around and still pretty much living on her own, at 99 years of age.
Their old home place is nearly as special to me as it is to them. I spent many summers of my youth, living on the farm and working side by side with my grandparents. I loved the isolation of the place, miles up a gravel road before you reached their house. I loved the woods, the ponds, the fields, everything.
I didn't know they were poor. Hell, they didn't know they were poor. It never heard anyone complain about any of that kind of stuff. They wrung a living out of their sharecropping efforts, livestock, and gardens. Never had a tractor, a pickup, or a new car, but they had life, health, and family, and they didn't go hungry.
So I took them home, which actually is closer to where I live now than it is to where they live now.
They began the stories as soon as we hit the road. I'd heard most of them before, but it's like an old good rerun of Bonanza. You don't mind replaying it.
The house was adequate. They'd moved there after a previous home had caught on fire. My uncle was 3 months old and was laid on a mattress in the house. Someone who'd come to help fight the blaze grabbed the mattress in the smoke and confusion and threw into the yard. They didn't immediately realize that there was a child on it, in blankets. Intentionally or not, they'd saved him.
There was no electricity or plumbing when they moved in and they both recalled it being that way until they were nearly teenagers. When the electricity came in it was pretty big deal, but still they toted water from the spring in the woods, about 100 yards from the house.
There was an old well off the side porch, but the water was never fit for human use. They watered the animals with it.
Heated with wood and uninsulated, they spent many a cold winter's night, a family of five, huddled around the wood heater in the central front room that served as both a bedroom for their parents and a family room. With just one window on the Southern side, it was the warmest and least drafty in the historic blizzard of 1940.
It wasn't that much different when I stayed there. They had installed a pump in the well and there were two cold water faucets in the kitchen. Still no indoor facilities and still heated with wood. My grandmother cooked with wood as well, which made the kitchen an inferno in summer.
Gone are the huge oaks that shaded the place so perfectly. Gone are the smokehouse, the pack house, and several other outbuildings essential to life on a Virginia tobacco farm in those days.
The old stable is still partially there. I'd love to get some of the old full sized oak timbers and floor boards from it, still solid and substantial.
The whole place, the house, the property, the stable, everything seemed bigger all those years ago. Maybe it was because I was smaller. Maybe it was because it was filled family and laughter.
It's funny to me, that years after my grandparents were gone, the place was made into a migrant workers dwelling.
It didn't meet minimum acceptable living standards, so they had to add a clean well, hot water, upgraded electrical service, air conditioning, and a full bathroom.
The conditions under which my family had lived their entire lives were not good enough for the poor migrant workers from Mexico.
We left the house and headed on up the road towards the church, and the cemetery where most of their ancestors are resting.
Some have been there longer than others. We're told that a member of our family was the first one buried there, but the grave isn't marked anymore and they're not sure where it is.
Grandpa CJ, they called him.
He was tall wirey man. A hard man. A mean one when he drank, and drank whenever he could.
He worked on a local short line railroad for a bit.
He never went to school a day in his life, but he could read. He liked to read.
In the rail camp bunkhouse he'd read by the lantern before going to sleep.
A fellow in the bunk above him was said to have swung his leg off the side of his bed and it blocked the light, interrupting CJ's escape in the novel he was enjoying.
CJ grabbed the ankle and flung the leg back up, warning that a repeat of the indiscretion would bring dire consequences - "I'll put a ball through it!"
Whether the fellow thought he was joking or whether he simply forgot is unknown, but he did get a hole in his leg that night, and CJ's light was no longer interrupted.
He got a fresh bottle and headed off to his turkey blind one winter's day. A storm came and it was snowing hard. My uncle was told to go and bring him back tot he house. He said when he came to the blind CJ was sitting there, covered in snow and the bottle was nearly empty.
He said, "Grandpa CJ, we need to go to the house! it's snowing hard!"
CJ looked up at him, his hat and shoulders with about two inches of snow on them, and said, "OK. I didn't know it was snowing".
There are several CSA markers in the old cemetery.
More coming....
