Experience the ENDURANCE of Foundation Breeding
Thanksgiving, 1974
Every year since I was old enough to remember, during the week of Thanksgiving, my father dragged the entire family from our safe warm beds, clad in our pajamas and wearing socks on our feet, to the family car of the moment to drive hours and hours to his mother’s cold coal heated home in deep mountains of Walkersville, WV so he could go deer hunting with his brothers. This was a time of reunion with our many millions of cousins, aunts, uncles, second cousins, great aunts, great uncles, and any one else that cared to squeeze themselves into Granma’s small farm house and sit on the floor. It was a time of excitement and wild abandon for us kids because the adults were too busy with their own adult gossip and Thanksgiving Holiday joy to pay too much attention to what we were doing.
We had a blast. Usually.
My father comes from a large family of redneck hillbillies. He, as well as his brothers and sisters, have all grown and moved away from West Virginia. They’ve matured into respectable adults with well paying jobs, who attend church religiously every Sunday…yet they have never lost that hill mentality. Whenever they all get together, their love and passion are never to be exceeded by any family I’ve ever met in my short life on this planet. As with any strong passionate person, along with love and forgiveness, there is also anger and ego. Thankgiving, or any time the entire family was together, there was sure to be a fight (or two or three) and possibly even a broken nose, or stitches or even a trip to the hospital to set a bone or two.
My favorite uncle is Uncle Bill. That man has never had a mean word to say about anything. Everything in life is a joke to Uncle Bill and he intends you to laugh along with him, even if he has to pop you one to get you there. I kid you not. He’s awesome. As kids, we followed Uncle Bill everywhere. We walked like him and we talked like him. We’d swagger into a room with our thumbs through our belt loops like him and crack up anyone who happened to witness our attempts at being mini-Uncle Bills.
Our second favorite uncle, Uncle Frank, was just as silly as Uncle Bill. Not as eager to whomp up on us, and always there to have something silly to say about anything. He was the epitome of the word silly. I swear to you…go look in the dictionary and next to the word silly, you will find a photo of my Uncle Frank.
Well, my dad and these two brothers were very close in age and pretty much grew up as the Barbeque Holler Bad-Boys. Always in trouble, always together and always in a fight over something. (Barbeque Holler is the name of the place where my grandfather and grandmother eked out a living off a dirt farm. More on this later in the book.)
This particular Thanksgiving sticks out in my mind because it contains a memory that is forever etched there as if chiseled into granite. I was a young teenager and it was my debut into “Center of Attention” hood.
We left our home in a snow storm. We drove all through the night, in a huge pea green Chrysler Newport convertible that my father had just purchased. He was eager to show it off to his brothers and for a week before we left to Grandma Simon’s house, that was the hot topic of conversation. “Wait until they see this car!” he would preen.
The weather was horrible and my mother was very worried. For hours, we followed close behind a tractor trailer because that was the only way my father could see the road. The snow was driving down through the darkness, all but blinding him in the headlights with its sheer velocity of whiteness. Windshield wipers thumping back and forth kept a poor beat with the cracking of an AM radio station that faded in and out as we crossed into the mountains of West Virginia, losing the signal in the valleys and regaining it as we crested a mountain ridge.
We were supposed to be sleeping in the back seat, us kids packed in there with the dog, blankets, pillows and anything else that could be jammed into the spaces left over. Of course, we always fought over who would NOT be sitting in the middle of the seat. The middle person usually ended up being Bucky, my brother, because that was how he kept the peace between me and my sister Lisa. Of course, that’s what he’ll tell you…we really think he was fearful of sitting jammed up against a door that could open at any moment, spewing him forth onto the road at highway speeds, leaving him crumpled in the wake of the passing car.
Why would he think this? Because it happened to him in 1969 when he was 5 years old. We were on our way to have our family portrait taken when, taking a dare presented to him by yours truly, he opened his door and promptly fell out. OH MY GOD! It was fortunate for him that we weren’t going very fast and that he was on the passenger side of the car so he thudded on the side of the road and clumsily rolled down into a ditch. He was dirty, which was pretty standard for me and Bucky to be, and a little rumpled, also a standard we lived by, and totally unharmed.
Of course, Dad stopped the car and got out, yelling that he was gonna whomp up on someone. I wouldn’t admit to goading Bucky into his action and BUcky wouldn’t admit that a girl made him do it, so he got into trouble and I got to snicker.
Stupid.
My mother made us have our portrait done anyway, and you can see the dirt streaks on his white shirt. She uses this as a prime example of why I should have been locked up in my room until I was 40. She points this photo out to me on a regular basis.
Anyway, back to 1974…
The tension in the front seat where the parents were was thicker than mud in a pond. Mom was fussing at Dad for driving in the storm. Dad was demanding that Mom be quiet so he could concentrate of the road. The bickering had reached a loud crescendo of cursing and pleading.
The tension in the back seat where the kids and dog were all vying for personal space was even worse. It was rounded with comments to Mom like, “He’s touching me.” “No I’m not, you’re touching me.” “No, your foot is on my side.” “No it’s not, you are over your line and on my side.”
Of course, before we could even GET to grandma’s house, a fight ensued in the front seat, which gave us back seat people permission to have our own fisticuffs. And boy, oh boy did it get into a full blown boxing match.
SCREECH.
Dad hit the brakes, throwing the car into a semi-out of control slide on the snow covered road. Showered with screams from Mom, and hooting from us kids, he controlled that car right off the side of the road. He proceeded to yank us all out of the car, in our pajamas, in our stocking feet, to stand shivering in the blizzard to explain to him why we were breaking the rules of traveling.
Man. You never heard such fast talking.
Our feet were freezing and all we really cared about was getting back into that car. Being the eldest of the bunch, I was usually the spokesperson in times of crisis. Thinking fast on my feet, we ended up blaming it all on the dog and her flatulence. I explained, with grandiose hand gestures waving in front of my face, and hopping up and down while ringing my neck in pretense of choking, how we were trying to escape the horrendous death that awaited us if we have to keep smelling the dog’s butt and in our efforts to get away from the dog, it APPEARED we were fighting with each other but that was just not the case.
Being as it was after midnight, in the middle of a terrible blizzard and [I suspect] Dad was freezing as much as we were, he bought the story and let us all back into the car. Whew. One Point for the kids.
Mom glared at us, knowing full well that this was the biggest BS story she’d ever heard, but she also was glad to be back in the car so didn’t say a word about it. Not until years later and then it was too late to get whomped up on, so we didn’t care that she let the cat out of the bag. Dad, of course, didn’t remember this incident we were discussing and ignored our laughter while he tried to watch the end of a Thanksgiving Football game.
Now that we’re soaked and freezing, we all huddled up with each other and the dog in an effort to get warm. Buried beneath the mound of blankets and pillows, we did finally fall asleep and remember nothing further of that ride until we were rudely awakened to drag our sorry butts from the warm car into Grandma’s cold house to finish up our sleeping on a pallet made up of hand sewn quilts and butter pillows in the spare room.
We’re here!
Ah – Grandma’s house. It’s a wonder that few children get to experience in this day and age. I true wood stove for cooking on. The doubled as the heater for the entire house. A hand pump off the back porch from which all water was drawn. A small grey weathered wooden privy (out house) out back which seemed to be miles and miles away when it was dark and cold and you REALLY had to go. A galvanized wash tub which served to wash dishes and bodies using water heated on the stove splashed into the ice cold water drawn from the well. Thank goodness for being the oldest as I would get the first bath of the evening and had the cleanest water.
On the back porch you’d find a foot pedal operated washing machine. I loved that washing machine. When it was wash day, I begged and begged to run the foot pump. Up and down and up and down I’d work those pedals. We’d drain out the soapy water run the clothes through a hand cranked wringer made of two black rubber rollers. That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced. Heavy wet jeans go in…crank crank crank and a light, flat, mostly dry jeans comes out the other side while water streamed down the side into a galvanized bucket kept underneath. After draining the water out, we’d fill with rinsing water and start the process over again. Once the clothes were finished, we’d hang them on Grandma’s front porch to dry in the southern sun baking across the front of her house.
That front porch was a wonder! It had a hundred steps from the ground to the porch. And under that porch was the best playground a kid could ask for. Enclosed with hand crafted lattice-work, it was dry and secret. In the summer a kids could squeeze under there and sneak a cigarette, or listen the adult conversation on the porch above and learn all the secrets of the family. In the winter we could escape the adult boringness and creep from under the porch into the crawl space beneath the wood stove and have a grand time.
Once on top of the front porch, you entered the house through a door which opened directly into the living room. Only thing in the living room was an upright piano, a yellow divan, a gold stuffed chaor and a lamp. And those three items took up most the floor space. You then walked into the cramped dining room past the pie chest that Grandpa made, totaling 18 steps and you exited the house onto the back porch. Now you are at ground level. Very inventive, those West Virginians. House and barns build on hillsides and you’d be SURE that they’d slide off come the first hard rains of spring.
If you ran off the back porch, around to the left and threw yourself into a ball, you could roll down the hill faster than the speed of light, all the way to the stone wall. Then you could race back to the bottom of the hundred stairs, climb up and start all over again. It was great.
On the other side of the house was a corn crib where we stashed all our comics and naked lady magazines. No adult ever went into the corn crib because it was full of mice and spiders and dust and old musty smelly stuff that they didn’t want to see any more. All us kids and cousins and neighbors and whomever else showed up that wasn’t too old to be disgusted by the corn crib, knew about the secret hiding places in there. We carefully put our stuff away after each visit so it would be there for the next kid to play with. It was an unspoken rule that was never broken in all the years as we were growing up.
And behind the corn crib was a rickety old barn where the molly mule lived. She was older than the barn and just as rickety. If you could be patient, she would lay down to rest and you could climb up on her back and wait until she decided to stand to get a well waited for mule-ride as she meandered over to the feeder to nibble at the goodies we’d leave in there for her. She was a grand ol’ mule with ears longer than our arms and a tail as thick as a broom bottom. She could bray louder than we could yell and we egged her on many a day into singing along with us. She’d bray, we’d yell, she’d bray and so on until some mean adult would emerge from the green trimmed white clapboard farm house and yell at us to knock it off.
During summer visits, we were unable to contain our joy at living free from adult control. There was nothing around for miles and back in those days, adults didn’t worry about kids getting snatched, or run over by cars, or killed by a serial child molester. As soon as we’d get to Grandma’s house, we’d run down the path to the creek and play for hours catching crawdads and minnows. We’d build dams in the creek that would stand up through storms and high flood waters to greet us with new holes to swim in visit to visit. Each time a family visited Grandma, the kids of that family would go to the creek and build up the dam some more. By the time I was a teenager, and my grandma moved into a nursing home, that dam was huge. We had a swimming hole to beat any pool anywhere in the world. A hole that we created with our years of dam construction.
So, back to our Thanksgiving trip. We wake up the next morning to the smell of coffee and bacon frying. Mmmmm. Bacon. And yes, we coined that phrase, not some dumb dog on a commercial for fake bacon treats. Trust me on this one. Try waking up to the smell of fresh farm bacon sizzling in a blackened cast iron pan and see if you don’t say, “Mmmmmm, Bacon.”
Rules of Grandma’s house. When you wake up, fold up the quilts and put them away in the wardrobe. Fluff up the butter pillows and put them back on the divan (this was the word she used for her sofa). And DON’T pee in the white enamel chamber pot, get your sorry butt out to the privy and do your business. The chamber pot if for midnight emergencies only, and if you used the chamber pot the night before, it is your job to take it with you to the privy and dump it, then rinse it out back under the hand pump.
That’s a nasty job, so we desperately tried not to use the chamber pot.
The day was dark, both outside the house and inside the house. The snow hadn’t let up and it was already over a foot deep outside. My father comes here to hunt with his brothers, his son and their sons and he wasn’t happy about this much snow. We knew that the deer would be holed up through a storm like this and there’d be no flushing them out.
So the day is dark and the mood of the adults is dark. To top things off, Dad was the only brave [re: dumb] adult that drove through the storm to Grandma’s house so we were there all alone. No wild family reunion of cousins and dogs and neighbor kids. No laughter and singing and card playing. Just silence and the soft falling of snow. Occassionally, the silence was broken by a stream of cursing as Dad complained about the weather, complained about his brothers not showing up or complained about something just to be complaining.
We played inside for awhile and the snow changed over to freezing rain. The rain crusted the snow and coated the trees with the limb breaking weight of winter diamonds. It finally stopped around lunch time.
By early afternoon, the sun was out and everything glittered like jewels strewn on a beach. It was too tempting to stay inside. We were bored and Grandma knew it. She quietly instructed us, out of earshot of Mom and Dad, how to find some fun outside. She sent us out to the barn loft and we found old beat up car door shells there. She had told us these would make great sleds. We looked them over and tried to imagine sliding down the back hill on these makeshift redneck sleighs until Bucky came up with a plan. Ah, good ol’ Bucky, the ever inventive brother. Always building something or tearing something apart.
We found rope and knotted two doors together. Then we found old blankets and wrapped them tightly over the inside of the doors so we could sit on them without ripping our clothes on the odd pieces of metal exposed on the shells when they were dismantled from the car which bore them. We hauled this contraption a half mile up the back hill to the very top and looked down upon the unbroken snow that lay waiting for our descent. It was a long, steep and precarious way down that hill and I couldn’t imagine that we could have any fun on this chevy/ford marriage of steel and cloth.
“Come on,” Bucky conjoled. “We can all fit on it and go down together.”
I hopped on and we pushed off.
HOLY CROW! We were in a death trap.
That unbelievably concocted mess of steel hit that ice crusted snow and whisked us down the hill towards certain death. If we managed to miss Granma’s house below us, then we were going to continue past and hit the stone wall. If we somehow managed to jump over the foot of wall protruding from the top of the snow, then we would continue down the hillside through the jungle of briars and scrub trees bound there by that wall and we would surely die in a wicked crumpling mess of steel and little broken bodies.
WHEE! This is great fun!
Our dog bounded along side us, barking in glee as she chased the sleigh down the hill.
We screamed in pure joy of speed.
We screamed at the dog to move.
We screamed at each other to JUMP. NOW!
We screamed as the doors hit the wall and blew apart, leaving shreds of blanket and hemp rope strewn across the top of the ice crusted snow.
We screamed as it bounced over the top of the wall and disappeared into the maze of ice coated jumble.
We screamed when our mom came out on the porch and started yelling at us to shut up.
Oops…can’t get the adults involved.
Bucky, brave soul that he was, still had ahold of the rope and he saved our sleigh. Together we pulled that sleigh up over the rock wall, saving it from certain death behind the wall and we trudged back up the hill to do it all over again.
We played outside in the snow, screaming down the hill over and over, until it got dark and mom came out to ring the bell which said, “Come on in now, dinner is ready.”
And dinner was dark. None of my dad’s bothers or sisters had come to Grandma’s yet, so the mood was bleak and silent throughout dinner. The food tasted like starch, mostly because Grandma cooked everything to cardboard consistency, but also because there was no happiness at the table. We played cards until bedtime and then went to make up our pallet of quilts and butter pillows.
As we lay there, hoping to get the adventure of the day out of our mind so we could sleep, my brother and sister begged me to sing them a story.
Oh, alright. What kind of story do you want to hear?
Bucky suggested a story about wolves and bears.
Lisa suggested a story about fairies and elves.
We argued about it for several minutes until Mom came and told us to shut up and get to sleep.
Dag nabbit, snagged again.
Okay, now we whisper. Bucky wants wolves and bear and Lisa wants fairies and elves.
Fine. How about a song about wolves, bears, fairies and elves?
YEA! They agreed and I began the story song. Something like this, to the tune of Greensleeves.
What forest is this
That lay to the west
That held a war of glorious fest
The light from east
Does tell the least
And now we find ourselves best
Hail hail here comes the wolves
They carry bears and fighting trolls
Hail hail here comes the elves
And fairies following closely, and voles.
And the story went on and on how the wolves and bears were fighting the fairies and elves for territorial rights to build their new homes. And I sang and sang until they were both asleep. I lay there for awhile, and was almost asleep when I heard my mom softly telling me goodnight, and good song.
Wow, now that was a revelation. Mom was also sitting and listening to my song.
How weird is that? That was my moment of revelation. I was the family entertainer. That was my job and it struck me as a very important job. I have continued to hold that position ever since and it has gotten us through some very tough and trying times, Both my childhood family, my marriage with kids family and my marriage without kids family. I am always the one that finds a light in the darkness. I am the one that finds the meat on the bone. I am the one that finds the peace in the chaos.
The following day, my dad’s brothers and sisters started rolling in, dragging their multitude of kids with them. The rest of the week was a bedlam of joy and happiness as we played in the snow, in the corn crib and under the house while the adults did their boring adult stuff. It all worked out well and everyone left Grandma’s with at least one buck or doe, tagged and gutted, tied to the roof or trunk of their car.
The ride home was much better than the ride to Grandma’s. The weather was clear. Dad was happy, so Mom was happy. Us kids were too tired to fight over who was sitting in the middle and who was sitting by the stinky dog and we slept all the way through the night as Dad drove that big boat of a car those long miles to our home.
This set a precedence, by the way, that has stayed with our family throughout the years. Every Thanksgiving we get together...usually at my house since it's the biggest...and we celebrate one more year of life. Brothers and sisters, their children and grandchildren, together with those two parents that bore the burden of belonging to ME, reminiscing about the past Thanksgivings and all the trouble we got into when no-one was looking. It's grand fun.
Instructor/Manager: Dodie Sable
Located in New Smithville PA at 37 Fenstermacher Road, 3 miles north of Kutztown University
Call us at 610.756.3836 or email us at dodie@newpromisefarms.com