I Never Loved Her More

Snow came the night we reached Shenandoah in late December of 1968 after driving night and day from Southern California to make it while there was still time.

Two birds and holly.GIFIt lay shining on the fields in the light of a full moon, glistening on the trees, and falling softly before the headlights, whipped into small furies by the air displaced as we passed.

Uncle Charles and Aunt Ola were as excited as children that the first good snow arrived to greet us. Good luck, they said. It was late, nearly midnight when we arrived. My little sister Ellen was asleep in the back seat, sprawled out like a cat, limbs akimbo and face hidden in a bramble of long hair.

My father picked her up. Half awake, she put her arms around him and he carried her up the steps and across the wood slat porch. At the front door Uncle Charles reached out and took her into his own arms. She woke and hugged him tight while he cried, burying his face in her hair.

Ma lay in a hospital bed that dominated the living room from the middle like a hub, furniture pushed back to the walls and facing the bed as though on spokes. Her tiny body was shrouded by a thin white sheet and protected, in case she rolled over, by high rails on the bed’s sides. She hadn’t rolled over. She hadn’t even moved a finger.

Uncle Charles, my mother’s brother, had the ancient wood stove stoked up and pouring out heat so stifling that I could hardly breathe. Aunt Ola, mother’s sister, was general of the operation. She fussed over us, took our coats and pointed us to seats, all in the name of love, both of us and of order.

My mother had stood back until then, letting her siblings huddle around us first, embracing each of us in turn to erase the years of absence that had stood between us. That is her nature, to quietly observe and to talk only when there is something worth saying. Now she came to us, arms outstretched and smile wide. Winter birds.GIFShe had flown back several months before to be with her mother, the two of them caring for each other, the elderly mother and the daughter who had been recently ill. They had those few wonderful months together, taking walks as far as Naked Creek, sharing quiet meals, working side-by-side in the garden, before Ma had her stroke.

I don’t know if Ma knew we were there or not. She had the stroke a week before our arrival, had held out till then, but just couldn’t hold it off those final few days until we arrived. The stroke took her from us and put her in a coma. I gazed at her smooth face, pale and lineless, her white hair swept back and tucked behind her head.

She had worn a sun bonnet all her life, one of those pioneer woman types with full gathered cap, massive quilted brim, and short “skirt” in the back, all held on by a wide bow tied under her chin. That and a sun parasol kept her skin like a girl’s her whole life. She was so still now that I could not detect even her breathing. I leaned in and kissed her cheek. Uncle Charles put his hand on my arm; I turned and his thin arms encircled me next. We were not yet done with the greetings.Winter birds2.GIF

That night I slept above the living room, right about where I imagined my mother’s childhood bed had sat. The heat up there was just as unbearable as below, and I opened the window, pulling my light bed as close as I could to the cool air outside. Ellen and I watched a gentle snow fall, the fields sparkling in the moonlight. I breathed in the crisp night, so unlike the salt and dust I could taste in the air at home, near the Pacific Ocean in Southern California.

Sometime during the night lightning struck a nearby tree with a deafening roar. I bolted awake, my hair standing on end, the room shimmering with electricity. Ellen and I looked at each other with wide eyes. “Wow!,” we both said, California style, and crept to the window for some lightening gazing. There’s nothing like that in Southern California, and it was as good as a Disneyland ride.

The next day we explored the farm, my father, sister and I. We sifted through the old barn, gathering up the scythe and sickle, hay fork and cross-saw; examined the old worn wood, found a large draft horse harness with fat leather collar. In the house we marveled at the wood stove my grandmother still cooked on in 1969, and the flat iron she still heated on the stove to iron clothes. Bird cottage winter.GIFNot to mention the well-worn water pump that sat just outside the kitchen door, the outhouse just beyond the garden, the bedpans and washing basins that were still a part of daily life there.

My grandmother was never lured by the modern, never longed for the newest model washing machine or toaster. The only time I ever heard she wanted anything at all was after the first ride she took in an automobile. It belonged to Shenandoah’s physician, Dr. Shuler, who offered her a ride home from town one day. She came into the house grinning widely and said, “I’m going to get us one of those.”

Uncle Charles and Aunt Tessie, his wife, lived next door. Tessie loaned me magazines to read that winter, but my mother made me take them back when she saw that they were Hollywood gossip rags, Confidential, Screenland, Uncensored. I had never seen anything like them, much racier than the fan magazines you see today, full of lust and murder. Charles and Tessie lived in one of those upright old Virginia country houses whose only luxury was electricity, but theirs was furnished with the most salacious reading material of the day. The irony was not lost on me.Swifts.GIF

We settled into my grandmother’s house, my mother cooking on the wood stove, my father tidying up the farm, reading his newspapers and mumbling about the Vietnam War. He was a proud American and patriotic World War II vet, but was wholly outraged by this war. “Sending those boys to their deaths, and for what?”

Every day there were visitors, either neighbors bringing homey casseroles or family members coming to visit us and pay their respects to Ma. I loved every minute of it, wished we had kindly neighbors in California, wished we had more family there.

Ma and Pop, my grandparents, Florence and Tom Merica, were worried when their fourth daughter announced she was moving with her husband and baby to California. People didn’t leave Shenandoah, or not many did. Ma was especially worried. She and Ruth, my mother, had a special relationship. More than her other daughters, Ruth loved spending time with her mother, helping her in the kitchen or garden, going along when Ma went “a’visitin’.” Ma knew it would be many years before she saw her daughter again, and I know she grieved. Sure, we visited now and then. But not enough.Bird in snow.GIF

Now here we were and Ma didn’t even know. Or if she did, she could not communicate it. Occasionally I crept near and sat by her side, holding her hand. I was too self-conscious to talk to her, as Uncle Charles did, and did not feel intimate enough to stroke her hair and cheek, as my mother did.

I simply sat, awkwardly, until a closeness overcame me, a love for my grandmother who I barely knew, a longing for her to wake and turn to me with arms open to envelop me, making up for all those years away from her. After sitting with these feelings for a while, I could get up again and move on.

Ma’s brother, my Great Uncle Charlie, had a farm up at Number Two Furnace, just up the rise from Jollett Hollow. We drove over to his place one snowy afternoon to cut a nice Christmas tree, and were all delighted when he pulled out a full-sized sleigh and harnessed the big old work horse to it. A real sleigh, just like Santa had, even with bells around the horse’s collar. So there we went, dashing through the snow in our one-horse open sleigh, into the woods to find the perfect tree. Not Douglas fir, like we always got at home, but cedar, the traditional Christmas tree of Virginia.

The next few days were busy, what with Christmas around the corner. We shopped in Harrisonburg, and I spent a few days with my uncle Jesse’s family in Waynesboro. My Aunt Emily and I sat at her kitchen table and talked. I told her about the piglets at Great Uncle Charlie’s farm and she told me she would love to Bird with apples.GIFhave a lap pig, “They’re so cute. And smart.”

We went shopping and she gave me $5 to buy anything I wanted. I chose a yellow dress for Ellen. One afternoon, sitting in the kitchen, their son Tom came in with a friend. He looked to be a few years older than my 16. After introductions Tom nodded silently to me, then he and his friend disappeared into the back. “Well!,” I thought, “I came a long way to be here, I deserve better than that!” Years later we would be close friends.

When I returned my grandmother was yet there, quiet and still, breathing steadily, her face peaceful. My mother, Uncle Charles, and Aunt Ola took turns sitting by her side so Ma was never alone, though none knew if she was aware of the doting children who sat vigil. My mother took the evenings, pulling in a small bed to sleep beside her. That evening we gathered after dinner in the living room. Uncle Charles walked home, which was next door, just across the field. He stoked the fire again before leaving, as always.

Ola was gone, it was just the five of us. I pushed my chair near the thin-paned window to draw some of its chill, trying to offset the blasting heat. My father was on the couch reading a newspaper, my little sister on the floor playing. I looked up from my book and saw my mother standing over Ma’s bed, stroking her hair with tenderness.

Birds in holly.GIFShe spent her adult life in California, arriving with my father and their first baby, then a toddler, just after the end of World War II. We did not travel back to see her Shenandoah family as often as we would have liked. There were four children to raise, and cross-country travel was far more difficult then. My grandmother never learned to read or write, so intimate letters between the two were impossible. As for the phone, I don’t know why they did not talk more often, except that both tended to quietness.

And now my mother was like an angel at my grandmother’s bedside, her face as serene as Ma’s, radiating something so essential and chaste that it felt like an essence distilled to its truest form, that bond between child and mother, or spirit and body. Her hand lightly caressed Ma’s brow, slowly stroking her fine white hair back and to the side. It was the most simple expression of pure love I had ever seen, and I could not take my eyes from her. The room was quiet, only the occasional snap of sparks in the fire or rustle of paper. Robin in dogwood.GIFMa was as small as a girl, her form beneath the sheet barely more than a bas relief in cloth against the bed.

Mother brushed back a strand of Ma’s hair, tucking it behind her ear. She touched her brow, ran the back of her hand across her cheek. Then, her soft words, “She’s gone.” At that moment I had never loved my mother more.

My Mysterious Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows

My great grandmother is a mystery to me. My mother knew her well, but she’s 93 and can’t think of much to say about her. My cousin knew her too, but she has nothing to add either. I have no photos, no diaries, no one’s memories.

Here’s what little I do know. She had thick hair that she wore in a knot at the back of her neck. When she got old it turned pure white. She had a sweet face. She called my mother “Little Joe,” though her name is Ruth. She made mackerel cakes for lunch when her daughter and family came to visit.P1000721

Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows was born on May 10, 1864 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Page County, Virginia.

The “Magdalene” part of her name is not confirmed, but my mother tells me that was her second middle name, and I have seen “Mary M. M. Meadows” on several documents. So I’m going with it.

Mary was born during the Civil War, just about the same time her father died from it.

Not in it, mind you, but from it. The circumstances are a mystery, and there are several theories, but no evidence that would confirm any one of them.

One thing is certain: Mary grew up a fatherless child, and for this it is said she was given powers.

A girl who is born after her father dies is said to have the gift of healing a baby’s thrush. The healer has only to lean close and blow gently into the baby’s mouth.

Mary Meadows had this power, and through her life many new mothers cP1000789ounted on her healing breath. My mother says this was her only extraordinary healing power, but that it was well-used.

My grandmother, Florence Collier Merica, who was Mary’s child, learned many remedies from her mother.

Put an axe under the bed of a birthing woman and it will cut the pain in two, she said.

Brew ginseng root into a tea for the flu, sassafras for a fever.

Give brandy with sugar and water to a child with a cold.

I’m sure there were other poultices and tonics, oaths and spells that were engaged when needed.

Maybe I can pluck one or two more out of my mother’s memory, but mostly they are lost to history, as much a mystery to me as Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows.

Mary Meadows married William Collier in 1884, when she was 20 years old. He was 28.Mary M. Meadows and William Durret Collier wedding photo

He went by his middle name, Durret, which, with the Blue Ridge accent, came out as “Dirt.”

They owned property in the Blue Ridge. I recall it was a little over 450 acres.

Durret and his son-in-law, my grandfather, shaved tan bark in the spring to sell to the tannery in Elkton. That land made them a decent living.

Mary raised five healthy daughters and a big, strapping son. Annie, Emmie, Florence, Maggie, Charles, and Minnie, in that order.

They all grew up and married fine spouses, built or moved into homes of their own, and started raising their families.

Then came 1925. In late July Durret died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma after a long and painful illness. He was 69.

One month later their daughter Maggie died too, far too young, and leaving a 13-year old daughter.

So at age 50 Mary took on the granddaughter Maggie left behind. P1000782Maggie’s husband Comie Watson, a handsome young man, couldn’t care for his daughter, either through grief or aptitude, or because the family decided young Elsie Mae needed a woman’s care.

Elsie was raised with care, as loved as any child could be, and doted on by her grandmother and four aunts.

All Mary’s family was dear to her, and near to her. Only one daughter moved away, to Newport News, a half day distant. The others lived within a few miles of her Jollett Hollow home, two in #2 Furnace and two in Fleeburg.

What a time there was when the daughters visited! They sat and gossiped the afternoon away as the children played wild inside and out, or quietly read or listened while the women talked.

Her second to oldest, Florence, who was my mother’s mother, took her younger children with her on these visits.

When she could, she got her son Jesse to drive them, either in the car or in the wagon. Occasionally her husband Tom came along and did the driving.

Tom always greeted Mary the same, “Afternoon, Miss Mary.” Mary always answered, “Oh, Tom!” Theirs was a true respect and affection.P1000745

If there was no one to drive them, Florence and the children walked the several miles from Fleeburg to Jollett Hollow. Or, as the community called it, “Jolly Holler.”

They commenced several miles down Fleeburg Road, past Minnie’s house, past their beloved Oak Grove Church, then across Naked Creek and left onto Naked Creek Road.

They walked up past the Merica Store, the road winding with the creek, about six miles distant, till they reached the plank footbridge that took them across to Mother Mary’s log house.

As a routine they stopped along the way at Merica’s Store to buy several cans of mackerel.

They took the mackerel to Mary and she tossed it with an egg and a little cornmeal, shaped it into patties, and fried the cakes up in lard till they were hot and crispy. These were savored by the women and children alike during those visits.

After lunch the children might leave the women alone to talk in peace.

P1000715One late fall day Elsie was asked to watch little Ruthy and Annie Merica, my future mother and her little sister, play outside after lunch.

They got down to the bridge and started across. Elsie called to the children to be careful, just as little Annie gave Ruthy a good shove and she fell in.

Elsie ran into the cold creek, grabbed up Ruthy, and raced into the house to get off the sogged wool clothes and wrap her in a warm blanket.

All that afternoon Ruthy sat by the stove and listened to the women chatter, and loved every moment of it.

I wish I had a picture of that old log house. I remember it vaguely, still standing on the hill long decades after Mary died, logs mortared with mud chinking that was now so loose that the wind leaked in, three wood steps and a stoop up to the front door, packed dirt floor inside, though the second story was fairly nice with plank floors and better walls. Only Elsie lived there now, as old and decrepit as the house, with her vast and beloved store of folk songs she had gathered through the years.

I wish I had taken a photo the last time I saw it. Better yet, I wish I had wandered through with the nostalgia that I feel now that I am older. I would have liked to feel my great grandmother in that space, for I am certain her energy still radiated. Then I could have known a little more about her, not through documents or facts or other people’s memories, but through my own senses.

But it’s too late now. And what I’ve said is all I know about my great-grandmother. Except for where she was buried after dying on November 21, 1953, five months after I was born. Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows and William Durrett Collier rest now in the Samuels Cemetery in Jollett Hollow, where I visit them whenever I am in that part of the world.Mary & Durrett Collier headstone

Gypsies, Maligned and Misaligned

On a cool, late autumn day in 1930, or maybe 1931, Ruthy Merica and a small swarm of her grade school friends from the Fleeburg section of Shenandoah, Virginia, walked home from school as they always did, down the dirt road from their two-room schoolhouse, children dropping from the swarm here and there as they reached their front doors till it was just Ruthy, her brother Jesse, and her friend Helen. When they reached the Merica house, Ruthy invariably waved goodbye to Helen and ran around back to the kitchen door to find her mother.

But today was different. As the swarm made its way down the road one of the children spotted smoke coming from the woods. Gypsy encampmentThey all looked, and at the edge of the meadow they saw a gypsy camp, strange people with long dark hair and colorful clothes, mostly rags, lounging and milling about.

The children knew about Gypsies. They camped in the woods every autumn, then again in spring, migrating like birds south to escape the harsh northern winters and then back north in spring to some nesting grounds somewhere.

“Lock your children away, the Gypsies are near,” the children yelled, then ran ahead with shrill screams, arms outstretched and hearts thumping, racing in what they thought was a dangerous game to reach home before the Gypsies caught them.

By that night the news had spread. “The Gypsies are here,” people whispered to each other. Ruthy’s parents, Tom and Florence Merica, turned off all the lights, and kept them off so that Gypsy familygypsy marauders who sneaked by night would not see their house.

They kept the windows open all night too, so the family could listen for the chickens squawking, a sure sign something or someone was skulking about the property. They had been hit in years previous, a chicken from the coop, a ham from the smokehouse, vegetables from the garden, and they did not want to repeat those unnerving incidents.

It was different during the light of day. That’s when the gypsy women went door to door, selling expertly made baskets they wove from willows cut down by the streams. Ruthy’s mother bought one once. It was pretty, and she used it to carry vegetables from the garden.

The next day Ruthy’s older sister, Ola, drove her Model A Ford to Harrisonburg to shop. Ruthy went along, as Ola liked the company and Ruthy enjoyed seeing the shops in the larger town. That afternoon on the way back, after turning from Naked Creek Road onto Fleeburg Road, Ola pulled off to the side and stopped near the Gypsy camp. She turned to Ruthy and said, “I’m going to get my fortune read.”

Gypsy women Roma arrest New York 1934Ola was 13 years older than Ruthy and was married already to Raymond Grimsley, but she didn’t want her parents to think her reckless. “Don’t tell Ma or Pa,” she said, and jumped out.

She strode through the meadow, tall and confident, more so maybe even than Ruthy’s older brothers. Ruthy got out too, but went only to the middle of the road, where she stood to wait for Ola to return. She saw Ola enter the camp, then disappear behind a tent with a woman who must have been the fortune teller.

A few minutes later Ola returned across the meadow. She and Ruthy got in the car and drove the rest of the way home, where Ola dropped her off, picked up her baby, Ray, and drove back to her own home in Shenandoah. Ola never told Ruthy what the fortune teller said, and Ruthy never thought to ask her.

Seventy or so years later, I had my own Gypsy encounter. Six or seven years ago my husband and I visited Rome. I had been before, and knew exactly where in the city and its surroundings I wanted to take him.

OGypsy_family_from_Serbiaur hotel suite had a beautiful view of the Roman Coliseum on one side, and around the corner on the other was the spectacular Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. We decided to start our day there.

After touring this, the largest church in Rome, we were ready to eat, and so walked down the church’s massive stone steps and across the plaza to an osteria we had noticed before.

The plaza was crowded with tourists, even though we like to travel in off months to escape the crowds, say when it is rainy or cold, or both, as it was that day. Before we reached the osteria two mothers and their children approached us. The women both carried babies, and a half dozen children surrounded them. The mothers caught and held our eyes, pleading for money to feed their children, and then the children mobbed us, their hands out and cupped, pulling on our clothing and talking all at once in some language I did not recognize. We were sympathetic, but the scene was getting out of hand. We kept moving, but they bound themselves around us inescapably.

Their sudden appearance startled us, erasing any spiritual calm we absorbed while inside the church, and as these moments were just short of frightening, we frantically made our way to the osteria. Just before we reached it, they fell away and disappeared. All this happened over only a few seconds.

Once inside the quiet osteria we regained our calm over a relaxed lunch, planning where to go next. When we were ready to leave, Patrick, my husband, reached for his wallet. It was gone, as was his passport, his credit cards, and about $1,000 in cash, which we stupidly had not put in a safety deposit box that morning.

I immediately jumped up and ran outside to find the two mothers, or a policeman. roma-people1Scanning the street, I spied one of Italy’s tiny police cars rounding the church, and flagged it down. What ensued was a mad-cap ride through the streets of Rome in the back of a police car, with countless other police cars joining the chase, each going a different way. It was comical in a Buster Keaton, Keystone Cops way.

Long story short, we found the culprits, and they were arrested. The Roman authorities asked us politely if we would go to court the next day to testify. It seems that there was a terrible crime wave against tourists in Rome, and they needed our help to convict these perpetrators. Most tourists, they said, will not agree to testify, because they don’t want to lose precious and limited tourist time in the courthouse. We, on the other hand, thought this sounded like a wonderfully unique adventure, practically worth the cost of our losses, and so agreed.

I’m skipping many of the interesting details, but the upshot of our adventure was that once in court the prosecutor said the thieves were Gypsies, members of a huge group of refugees from war-torn Bosnia who came here with nothing and so turned to thieving to feed their families.

MontenegroRoma-people (Large)Once we found out more about these maligned people we felt compassion for their lifetime of misfortune. We decided we did not want to press charges, but by that time it was too late. The state had taken control. We didn’t even have to testify for those two women to be convicted, and for their children to be put in homes, though family members would be able to extract the children. The sentence was one year. We felt horrible. My husband kept track of the sentence, and on the anniversary of their release we hoped and prayed for their better lives.

The Gypsies are mysterious, and their origins just add to the mystery. We know they were originally from India, and their language even today, for any left who speak it, is based on Sanskrit. But we don’t know why they left India in the 10th century, migrating through Persia and arriving in Europe roughly 800 years later, where they were given the name Gypsy, because Europeans of the Middle Ages thought they were from Egypt.

gypsies._1923They came to America originally in the 17th and 18th centuries, banned as they were from England, France, Portugal and Spain. More arrived from Serbia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary after the 1880s.

Today there are between 100,000 (National Geographic) and one million (Wikipedia, PBS) Gypsies living in the United States, mostly in Los Angeles and Chicago, and about 12 million worldwide.

Governments around the world have always tried to ban the Gypsy’s way of life. They said, “You cannot live in wagons pulled by horses and travel in caravans.” Later they said, “You cannot live in vans and travel from place to place. You must have a house, and send your children to school.”

It is no better for the Roma (the Gypsy name for themselves) today. Right now, the anti-Roma sentiment is only growing. Hundreds of thousands of Roma fled the war-torn Baltic states into Western Europe. Now France and Italy burn their camps and deport them. In Romania their homes are bulldozed, even though the Roma may have lived in them for decades. The EU put travel restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria, hoping the stem the tide of Roma emigrants.

A backlash against the hatred is growing. Pope Francis spoke out against Roma discrimination. He said, “I remember many times here in Rome when some Gypsies would get on the bus, the driver would say: ‘Watch your wallets!’ This is contempt. It might be true, but it is contempt.”

Will the Gypsy culture survive? It has already lost much, and now, not since Hitler has there been such dedication to eradicating that way of life, if not those people themselves.

A revered Gypsy poet called Papusza wrote,

The time of the wandering Gypsies

Has long passed.

But I see them,

They are bright,

Strong and clear like water.

You can hear it

Wandering when it wishes to speak.

But poor thing, it has no speech

Apart from silver splashing and sighing.

Only the horse, grazing in the grass,

Listens and understands that sighing.

The water does not look behind.

It flees, runs farther away,

Where eyes will not see her,

The water that wanders.

GypsyRuthy, my mother, knew instinctively that the gypsies didn’t steal children, but our reactions to superstitions are not triggered by our rational minds.The mysterious “other” has always engendered fear.

Yes, my family’s only two encounters with Gypsies involved theft, and a culture of theft is intolerable. But with so many fears bestowed upon the Gypsies, do they even have a chance to live better lives? The world denies them their nomadic life, denies them the tradition of oral rather then written knowledge, says their children must attend school.

They have clung to their ways through centuries of the worst persecution. But can they survive this latest attempt at forced integration? demo-roma-youthThe Gypsy’s ways have always been misaligned with the cultures around them.

Perhaps that’s why they first took to the road. And maybe that’s why they stay on the road even today, because wherever they stop, they are eventually asked to leave. No wonder they are nomadic.

 

My Blue Ridge Family Tree (Album)

This is the last, part Nine of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction series. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six,  Seven and Eight

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 9

Blue Ridge longThe Blue Ridge Mountains got themselves into the blood of five generations of my ancestors.Ola_Florence_Ruth_Jessee_and_other_Mericas_and_Comers_Shenandoah..CU.r

Those once-giant peaks, which formed when Africa and North America collided more than a billion years ago, and then rivaled the Himalayas in majesty, also helped to form my Blue Ridge ancestors, and me.

The granite and gneiss stone that lay beneath the mountains’ thin soil hardened our ancestors’ backbones.

The thin layer of gray loam and tenacious red clay made farming difficult, but built our ancestors’ perseverance.

We are who we are today in great part because of who the mountains made them.

Those mystically blue mountains shaped two sets of my fifth great grandparents way back Ruth Merica (rt) & Phyllis Grimsley c1940noborderin the 1700s: Francis Meadows and his wife, Mary; and Martin Crawford and his wife, Elizabeth McDonald.

And seven sets of my fourth great grandparents: John Phillip Dietz and Catherina Heck, Martin Alfred Collier and Mary Williams, John McDaniel and Elizabeth Crawford, Bird Snow and Polly Mayhugh, William Breeding and Susannah Tanner, William Lamb and Mary Gear, and James Meadows and Catherine Boswell.

They shaped seven sets of my third great grandparents: Johannes Markey and Elizabeth Dietz, Preston Collier and Elizabeth Haney, Ellis Turner and Susannah Smith, Levi Lucas and Elizabeth Utsler, Thomas Meadows and Elizabeth Breeden, John McDaniel and Martha Snow, and Zachariah McDaniel and Nancy Lamb.

And they molded four sets of my second great grandparents: Mitchell Meadows and Verinda McDaniels, George Merica and Catharine Wagoner, Smith Collier and Frances Ruth Merica and Parents, Shenandoah VA, c.1940.CU.rMcDaniel, and David Turner and Catherine Lucas.

As well as my great grandparents, William Durrett Collier and Mary Meadows, and Joseph W. Merica and Elizabeth Turner.

And my grandparents, Thomas Austin Merica and Florence Elizabeth Collier.

They all lived and died within a few miles of each other up in the Blue Ridge.

They worked the soil, raised their families, danced, praised God, leaped in joy, crumbled in sorrow, stood for what they believed and ignored the rest for upwards of 300 years.Ruth Berryman and Teddy 1943 Shenandoah.r

They shed their blood, sweat, and tears in those mountains.

It’s where they lay their bodies down to rest each night, and at life’s end.

And finally, 80 years ago, they walked down those mountains, into the valleys below, and never went back.

Their time passed. That gate locked against them forever.

Pick up a handful of soil within Shenandoah National Park today and hold it. You can practically feel their hearts beat.

You can smell their blood and sweat, taste the saltiness of their tears. That earthiness, that is them. And us.

Mary M. Meadows and William Durret Collier wedding photo

William Durrett Collier and Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows, my great grandparents, married April 27, 1884, Page County

 

Thomas_and_Florence_Collier_Merica_wedding.r

Thomas Austin Merica and Florence Elizabeth Collier, my grandparents, married July 22, 1906, Page County, Virginia

 

Ruth__Ted_Berryman_c.1941-r

My parents, Ruth Virginia Merica and Theodore Newton Berryman, married May 29, 1940, Washington, D.C.

And we continue, happily, and grateful for our Blue Ridge Mountain ancestors.

The end.

My Mother’s Special Drawer

My mother had her own drawer as a child.

With a family ofViolet green swallow.GIF 12 in a four-bedroom farmhouse that’s all she could get, one drawer.

But she didn’t feel deprived, she felt special.

The way she put it was, “My mother gave me my own drawer.”

She doesn’t know if her brothers or sisters had their own drawers, because, “I just thought about my drawer, not theirs.”

It was the Depression, and theirs was one of the fortunate families. They had their farm, and Mom’s father had a good job with the Norfolk & Western Railroad. Doll 1912.GIF

They had abundant food and some income to buy new shoes and little combs, maybe a doll at Christmas, and to go to the fair once a year and get other occasional small luxuries that gladden a child’s heart.

In the afternoons after school, with her homework done and still too early for supper, she liked to open her drawer and look at her special things.

There was a small, doll-sized tea set, and sometimes she had teDoll tea set 3.GIFa parties for her doll on the downstairs parlor windowsill.

There was a doll’s comb, and sometimes she sat on the edge of her bed and quietly combed the pretty hair on her precious doll with the bisque head.

Brown thrasher.GIFBut what she loved best of all were her bird cards. She had a whole stack of them and she liked to take them out, spread them on her bed, and look at them.

She examined each of the birds, their colors, the fineness of their feathers, the tilt of their heads, the way they perched so lightly on a twig.

Then she turned the cards over and read what they said on the other side.

She read about the brown thrasher, that, “On beautiful May mornings he is seen and heard singing his clear, rollicking, joyous, and variable song, while perched on the topmost branches of tree or bush.” Dickcissal.GIFSuch vibrant, lyrical language!

She read that the dickcissel’s “unmusical song, which is given with great earnestness, resembles the syllables, ‘dick dick chee chee chee chee,’ and from this the bird’s name is derived.”

And that the crested flycatcher’s territory “is pugnaciously guarded by the male, who brooks no intrusion by any other bird.”

But mostly she looked at the delightful pictures. Each of them was drawn with great skill in vivid colors and detail exacting enough to show the bird’s features, but artistically enough to be a creative representation of the bird in its environment.

She handled them gently, always carefully restacking them and putting them back into the drawer, precisely in the near-right corner, squared to the two drawer sides.

Bird and bee.GIFHer mother gave them to her, only her, and she got a new card every time  her mother came home from the store with a new box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. They came one to a box.

Sometimes after looking at her bird cards she liked to go to the windowsill of her upstairs bedroom and watch for the real kind.

Her home was at the edge of land where the rolling green valley of Shenandoah meets the dense forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

She could look out past heBlue tailed sylph and crimson topaz.GIFr mother’s locust tree, west across the long sloped field where Stony Run Creek flows from Grindstone Mountain, and beyond that to far distance where Bearfence Mountain sits at the peak of the Blue Ridge Mountain range.

I don’t know if she knew how privileged she was to grow up in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

But she did recognize and treasure the beauty and everything that environment gave her.

Off in the field she could see vivid blue buntings perched precipitously on swaying twigs.

And grosbeaks with their bright red chests. Towhees were harder to see, blending Eastern bluebird.GIFwith the field grass and bushes until they flew from their hiding place.

Pretty bluebirds sometimes nested in the locust, and in summer the robins always seemed to be hop-hop-hopping along.

Sometimes she tried to catch them. “If you put salt on its tail,” her mother told her, “you can catch it.”

She tried sneaking up close. She tried tossing salt from as far as she could throw.

She tried dropping it on them from up in the peach tree, where she sat quietly until one got near enough.Black and white warbler.GIF

But nothing worked. She only realized years later that what her mother meant was that if she could sneak close enough to shake a sprinkling of salt on the bird’s tail, she was close enough to grab it.

No matter. The bird cards were just as amazing as the birds themselves.

They were painted by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, considered by some as history’s greatest portraitist of birds.

He did 90 paintings for Arm & Hammer’s chromolithographed bird cards.Great horned owl.GIF Today the originals are among the  collections of Cornell University.

Some say the cards were so popular that they helped create the Victorian era bird watching phenomenon, when dapper men and dainty ladies alike took to hill and vale to catch a prized view of rare and colorful birds.

Arm & Hammer added mottoes to the cards: “For the good of all, do not destroy the birds.”

It was already too late for the passenger pigeon.

What had been a bird so plentiful that flocks would darken the sky, became Passenger pigeon, last one.GIFextinct when Martha, the last one, died on September 1, 1914.

Now conservationists were afraid for other birds as well.

The birdwatching craze included watching for bird feathers on ladies’ hats, the more gloriBird of Paradise hat.GIFously spectacular the plumes, the better.

Some hats even sported entire stuffed birds. More than 95 percent of Florida’s shore birds were killed by plume hunters.

Two women objected. They started a group they called the Audubon Society, and waged a nationwide campaign to stop the feathers for fashion craze.

Thanks toSpoonbill.GIF them, and to conservationist president Theodore Roosevelt, an act of Congress was passed to stop the slaughter.

My mother was spared knowing any of that. She just loved her birds. And her bird cards.

I don’t know when she stacked theSummer tanager.GIFm in the near-right corner of her drawer for the last time.

They were still in there when she placed her high school diploma in the drawer.

And when she went off to Washington D.C. to work as a shop girl at Garfinkle’s department store.

The drawer became someone else’s, and the cards disappeared sometime over the years.

But my mother never lost hePatio July 10 2011 020r love of birds, and today, at age 93, she sits in the patio and watches yellow finches cover the finch feeding bags.

When her children call, she always tells them how her birds are doing, and whether the mallards have visited the swimming pool.

She doesn’t have any bird cards, but she remembers them, the favorite of all the special things she kept in the drawer that was her own.

The End.Crested titmouse.GIF

Should I Display This Photo?

A few days ago I wrote about all the strange emotions I felt when I saw the first photo of my mother as a child. I showed the picture before, but I’ll show it here again.

Ruthy MericaAfter editing the photo to remove some of the shadow and enlarging the portion where my mother is visible I was overwhelmed with feeling. I felt the thrill of discovery because after resigning myself years ago to never seeing an image of her as anything younger than 22 or 23, I found her in the shadows of a photo of my Aunt Ola I’ve had all along. I felt joy that I finally knew what she looked like. Disappointment that she was veiled in shadow and I could barely make out her features. Confirmation that she was the same brunette beauty I’d seen in later photos of her. Delight that she looked like a happy, spunky little girl. And a twinge of shame at seeing her in a smudged and ill-fitting dress. I tried hard to fight off that feeling, but there it was. It overtook me before my rational side could jump in and block it. So I can toss in the feeling of disappointment at myself for that rush to judgement.

The shame went against everything I thought I knew about myself, that I observe objectively and do not judge irrationally or without considering varied facts. (I infuriate friends for refusing to take sides.) But the dirty dress went against everything I thought I knew about my mother’s family. Would I have to rethink it all?

I’ve always heard about the clockwork routine they lived to. The chores her parents expected the kids to do every morning. The hearty and complete meals that were laid out three times a day for this farm family of 12. Wash day was every Monday and ironing every Tuesday. Her mother did all that, but each Saturday the whole family pitched in around the farm. My mother’s job was to clean the upstairs. Every Saturday she scrubbed the floors, washed the basins and windows, dusted, and tidied up. Her little sister had the job of cleaning the downstairs, but since she was three years younger her mother helped her.  Then Sundays were for church and a big supper, the table laden with roast chicken, macaroni and cheese, green beans or peas, rolls, and if they were lucky, a berry pie or coconut cake.

Such disciplined routine typically means a clean and orderly household. The oldest child, my Aunt Ola, 13 years my mother’s elder, was fastidious to the point of obsession. No dirt dared enter her spotless house. And no grime dared step foot on her property. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she washed the tire treads of her car after every trip to the store. Yet there was my mother in a photo of Ola and her tidy baby boy, with my mother looking like Pigpen from the Charley Brown cartoons. Of course, it’s easy for me to justify the way she looks in the photo. Maybe it’s Saturday and she just finished washing the floors. Maybe it’s a warm spring day and she’s been hoeing rows with her mother in the garden. Or a hot summer day and she’s been playing hide and seek with her Comer cousins down at the bend. Or she’s just back from the swimming hole. The kids swam clothes and all, and this would be a perfect swim dress.

It’s easy to justify a kid being dirty. But they’re not usually photographed that way. If we know a photographer will be present we dress our children to reflect well on ourselves. And if a photo turns out less than flattering we tear it up. It’s a small manipulation of reality that helps us shape the image we want to show to the world.  We take photos. We look at them and sort them, throwing out the bad ones, keeping the good ones, and choosing the great ones to display in frames. Or these days, as our home screens or screen savers. That is acceptable and normal behavior. All good, right?

Yet here I am with the only photo of my mother being one I bet her mother would not have wanted to last 84 years, as it has so far. As the only photo I have of her, I love it. And that pretty face and hair I recognize? I adore it. Pulling wider to show her leaning into the photo from over the porch rail? It makes me smile to see this joyous, impish girl who so wants to charm the camera. Even the composition of the photo is great, all angles and squares with the porch posts, house siding, chair back spindles, window frame, and my mother’s checked dress. Quite artistic. These things make me happy. Then I zero in on the dress and suddenly my emotions become very mixed. I don’t like the sour shame that creeps into my warm soup of emotions. Again, it’s easy to justify a dirty kid. But photos worthy of display can’t come with attached captions that explain the circumstances.

I sent the photo to a photo restorer and got back an improved version where some of the shadows were removed from my mother’s face and dress. It was now slightly improved, but still nothing I considered mantle-worthy. Here’s the cleaned-up version:

Ruthy_Merica_c.1930Her mother, my grandmother, would not want to display the photo. Aunt Ola wouldn’t either. And my mother would certainly have thrown it away. But it’s the only one I have.

Should I display the photo?

The Only Photo of My Mother’s Childhood

Mine is not a family of photographers. We don’t click pictures of every party or parade. We don’t all put on white shirts and jeans to sit on rocks at the beach for annual family portraits. We don’t even usually remember to document landmark events like birthdays, graduations, or meals that aren’t burnt. That requires a certain kind of self-consciousness that we’re short on. It may have originated with my grandfather, who rejected the “bourgeois life of Wall Street” and moved his family into a utopian community in the 1930s.

Whole decades are missing from our family’s life in pictures. I never thought about it much, but now that I’m older I’m beginning to think not just about where our family is going, but where it’s been. We humans nearly always feel that inexplicable connection with the homelands of our ancestors, and with our “roots.” We know there is a genetic imperative to favor family, but it’s more than that. There’s a sense of grounding, of the permanence, even immortality that comes from seeing the long line of ancestors that reaches behind you, then panning forward we can see that same line extending into the future and on over the horizon.

My family is probably better at knowing we’re related to, say, Sir Isaac Newton or steamship builder Robert Fulton, than we are at knowing our immediate ancestors. Thankfully, my father’s long-gone mother documented his every childhood phase. Flipping though the photo album I see him posed in his christening gown, a page later in his velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, then bundled in funny little coat and ready to go outside, then I flip the page and there he is with old Nell, the harness horse that pulled his grandfather’s buggy. In all these posed photos he was with his usually identically dressed fraternal twin brother.

But my mother? Fugedaboudit. I never saw a picture of her as a child. The earliest photo of her must be around age 22 or 23, and even then it’s just a snapshot from a distance far enough to have to look close to see it’s her. Of the few photos I have of her before age 45, none show a clear view of her face. This one, of her and my older brother as a baby, is typical:

Ruth Berryman and Teddy c. 1944I don’t care how good your photo editing software is, you’re not going to find my mother’s face in there. Which is why my heart skipped a beat when I peered into a tiny two inch by three inch photo of my aunt and her toddler boy and there, in the shadowed background, was a figure that might have been my mother. Might have been. As in, I felt a glimmer of hope. Aunt Ola is front and center in the photo. She’s in the yard of her parents’ Shenandoah, Virginia house, all smiles and looking modern in her short skirt, flapper cloche and baby Ray in her arms. He’s wearing his jumper with the big buttons and white shirt, high socks, and his Buster Browns. There’s a Model something-or-other Ford in the driveway behind them. I’ve had the photo for years but never stopped to examine it because, well, it was Aunt Ola, not my mom, and that figure in the background was too faint to see much of. This is what the photo looked like to me. Like I have glaucoma:

Ola Grimsley, my aunt, holding baby Ray at home of her parents, Tom and Florence Collier, in about 1930. Ruth Merica, my mother, is on the porch in background

No, the borders aren’t really that dark, but this is exactly how the photo felt every time I glanced through the album. Then a few weeks ago I decided to restore some of our old photos and get copies to other family members. I brought out the album for the first time in quite a few years and looked at the pictures with the idea that the newest restoring and retouching programs could correct some of their problems. I took another look at the photo of Aunt Ola and baby Ray.

Ola Grimsley, my aunt, holding baby Ray at home of her parents, Tom and Florence Collier, in about 1930. Ruth Merica, my mother, is on the porch in background

Could that be my mother? I had to move the lamp to spotlight the photo. I rested the heavy-handled and usually only decorative magnifying glass onto the edge of my keyboard, and practically stopped breathing to get an unblurred view. But yes, I was certain, that is my mother! I imagined she had just been out playing in the summer fields somewhere, maybe playing hide and seek with her Cardin cousins down at the corner. More likely she was with her mother in the garden. Unlike her sisters, she liked be out there digging holes with a hoe while her mother came along behind planting beans or peas. Or going along the bean rows with a stick in her right hand to knock worms off the leaves, dropping them into the pan she carried in her left hand.

Sometimes she climbed up into the big green gauge plum tree while her mother worked below. It was cool amid the leaves, and she liked to eat plums and watch her brothers out in the fields. Or sometimes she went in the kitchen and brought out the salt shaker, then poked around for the biggest, reddest, juiciest tomato, licking its silky skin so the salt would stick, then biting into its warm flesh till juice spilled down her chin and onto the front of her dress. No mind. Gardening is dirty work, and that’s what old clothes are for.

Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t being the star of any photograph. She may have looked up from whatever she was doing and seen Ola, her autocratic oldest sister, looking like the center of attention with her baby boy and having her photo taken by her husband, Raymond. Mom probably thought, oh no you don’t, it’s not just you and Ray and Raymond. I’m here too.” So she skipped up to the porch in her little black slippers, leaned over the rail, and smiled for the camera. 

I sent the photo to an expert photo restoration artist and asked her to give it all she’s got. A day later she emailed me back this:Ruthy_Merica_c.1930

The thick brunette hair and something about that barely-visible face told me this might be the one and only photo that exists of my mother as a child, this half-lit figure peering over the porch railing, crowding into a photo that isn’t supposed to be of her. She looks about nine or ten. The camera is oblivious of her, but she’s smiling for the photographer like the beauty queen she would later be. I’d recognize that alabaster skin anywhere. Her mother made her carry a sun parasol whenever she was out in the sun. And her gorgeous hair. She wore it shoulder length into her early 50s, and it always fell across her forehead in cascades of soft waves. She told me about those slippers too. Her father bought them for her before a church recital, and she loved the dainty little things. So different from the lace-up boots with thick stockings that she wore all winter. I don’t know anything about that old dress, except that the last duty for any bit of clothing, before being torn up for rags and rag rugs, was for wearing to do work like cleaning and gardening. 

This is the one picture to the thousands of words in the stories my mother has told me. The tomatoes and the plums and the bossy sister and the pretty slippers and the seed sack dresses and happy summers. It gives evidence to more than the stories too: To my experience of her smile and her soft hair and her impish humor. I am now the proud owner of exactly one photograph of my mother’s childhood. But that’s all I need, just the one.