I remember her standing over the old, white wood stove with the water warmer and the biscuit warmers. I remember her wiping her forehead with the apron. Mountain kitchens get hot in the summer, and when there are up to three meals cooked each day, they are usually warm. I…
The old man and me met on a dirt road. He got out of his old Chevy truck slowly and deliberately. He sized me up without seeming to – the mountain way. He nodded, and I explained who I was and who I knew and where I was heading. I…
Another time, another vital way of life for mountain folk. Green gold. You were allotted how much tobacco you could raise according to the size of your farm. Some raised as little as two-tenths of an acre. For someone to have over an acre was unusual in those days. This…
In 1980, my dad became ill with a rare disease called polymyositis. He was very weak and was in the hospital for a long time, several months actually. He was in his late 60’s at that time and had retired from his job at Ingersoll-Rand. Although he slowly improved, he…
The old barn has a story. I closed my eyes and could feel the barn “talking” to me… I knew some of your kin. They came across these hills and settled in here. They built shelters and church/schoolhouses and then they built barns like me. I’m just old and useless…
When I was a little girl, one of the big events of the summer was my dad’s family reunion. Mother spent all day on the Saturday before cooking and baking, fixing enough food to fill up her big brown picnic basket. She always cooked roast beef along with various vegetables…
The porch was wide with white columns and a plain tongue-and-groove floor. The house was a blue house painted white! There was a one-car shed out back behind the woodshed, where I spent many an hour splitting kindling and stove wood for the cookstove and the heater. The car shed…
Since I love history and genealogy, I decided to try to find out how many of my eight great-great-grandfathers actually fought in the Civil War. I knew already that two of them had been soldiers because I had already written about them. During my research for this project, I found…
They came across these hills from everywhere. Scotch-Irish, German, and European, and all parts in between. They saw these beautiful mountains and valleys and sank deep roots into the soil. They worked from light to dark, grubbing, chopping, sawing, and building. They came across the hills with a broadaxe, a…
It all began many years ago when my grandmother, Blanche Dwiggins Smith, gave me a daguerreotype of one of her ancestors who was killed in the Civil War. I wish I had asked her more about it, but being young and busy earning a living, I did not have time…
