Sepia Saturday -- Salt of the Earth

Kind of timeless, this first picture.  When do you think?  1901? 1925? 1933? 

Nope - 1974. The year  after we bought the upper part of the Freeman farm in the mountains of North Carolina.

It was the farm Louise Payne Freeman grew up on. And after many years of sharecropping, she and her husband Clifford bought it from the other heirs.

Clifford and Louise grew up in a time that was almost timeless --no electricity,  no cars or trucks; they cooked and heated with wood.  No bathroom -- just a zinc tub in the kitchen on Saturday night, a 'little house' out back, and chamber pots under the beds. Raising most of your own food was the norm -- a grocery list might consist of flour, salt, baking powder, and coffee.

Louise told me that she was 'a great grown girl' before she traveled as far as the nearest little settlement -- two miles away.  As a young man, Clifford left the mountains to go to Detroit to work in the auto plants but, after tasting the city water, got back on the bus and headed home -- where he belonged.

The power pole in the second picture is a tip off that we're in more modern time.  (Clifford and Louise didn't get power till the Sixties.) Clifford is riding Nell, his slow-moving thirty-three year old mule. He's had two hip replacements and can't hardly go, he says.

Louise, a few years younger than he at sixty-nine, is a 'stout woman' and can out climb the thirty-something Florida woman taking the picture. They're heading up the mountain to salt the cows --  a weekly chore. Their cow dog Patsy  is following Louise.

My son and my nephew were thrilled to get a ride on Nell.

And my husband and I were thrilled to find ourselves adopted by these mentors. We learned how to plant potatoes, to raise a crop of tobacco, to milk a cow, churn, and make butter, We learned how to raise pigs on that extra milk and how to butcher them and put up all that good meat.  John learned how to plow with a team of mules; I learned how to wring a chicken's neck.

We learned the language of our new home -- branch for stream, chat for gravel, poke for bag --  and we learned to love and respect these folks for their wisdom and goodness.

Thirty some years later -- we are the old folks now,  passing on the lessons learned to the younger generation.  

And the stories I heard and the realities of the mountain farm have all found their places in the setting of my mystery series, just as there's a bit of Louise and Clifford in more than one of my characters.

Truly, they were the proverbial 'Salt of the Earth.'

Go HERE for other Sepia Saturday posts . . .

Pink Plush Album

This album belonged to my husband's grandmother, Fay Parker. It must have been quite impressive when new. I've read in novels of the Victorian and Edwardian eras about 'plush albums' -- I think this may be one, covered as it is in pink velvet.

The pages are beautiful with special slots for pictures. I have no idea who the dour group of four are but the three in the other picture are Annie and Walter Parker with young Fay between them.

 

I do wish I knew who this saucy minx was!

This is, alas, the only picture in the album that's identified. On its back, in fading pencil it says "1887 - Kissimmee, Florida" and gives three names. The first is completely illegible, the second is James T___, and the third is Walter Parker -- my husband's maternal great grandfather.

Kissimmee (a Seminole Indian name with the accent on the second syllable) was a cow town. As late as the 1950's Florida had more cattle than Texas, believe it or not. 

These three look like fellas in a saloon, waiting for a fight to break out. Look at the rakish tilt of Walter's hat!

Looks are deceiving. Walter went on to become a respectable business man and owner of a big hotel in Tampa. 

Here are some more pictures from the pink plush album.

 

Wonder Woman

Oh, Wonder Woman -- how you've changed! This super-hero daughter of the Amazon queen came into being in the Forties -- wearing first a flirty star-spangled skirt and later, rather dorky starry shorts. (She got her start fighting the Axis powers during World War II, therefore the patriotic garb.)

This is the Wonder Woman of the early Fifties -- the one I remember. With her golden Lasso of Truth, her tiara that doubled as a boomerang, her pair of bracelets with which she could deflect bullets, and her wonderful invisible airplane, she was a force to be reckoned with, a pre-women's lib, liberated woman, to be sure. (She'll break free of that rope, you can be bet on it!)

Research shows me that in the Fifties,  Wonder Woman was accused of promoting a lesbian agenda  ...

Hmm ... I guess I wasn't paying attention back then. I was fond of WW (or Diana Prince as she was known when not in her spangled shorts) but really, we were just friends. Besides, she had a boyfriend. Steve Trevor showed up fairly often -- usually in some sort of trouble so that she could rescue him.


I liked that.

In the mid-fifties I abandoned comic books for paperback science-fiction. And by the time there was a Wonder Woman TV show, I'd pretty much lost interest in the strong-willed Amazon princess  -- but in surfing the Internet to find out what WW's been up to, I see she's still  fighting crime ... and  in spite of her age (two years older than I) looking more fabulous than ever!

Wish I knew her secret.

UPDATE: My older son just sent me this LINK  to more images of WW by this illustrator, Brian Bolland. Oh. My. Goodness.

The Accidental Colllector

In my post on "Julie and Julia," I mentioned that I began my married/cooking life with family recipes as well as a few good cook books. As the years have gone by, I've acquired many, many more, whether by inheritance, gift, or considered purchase. You'd almost call it a collection.

Along with my grandmother's well-worn grater and cooling rack, I inherited a slew of cookbooks --her personal recipe collection, with many familiar favorites in her own spiky handwriting, is my sentimental favorite.

But these two, from the Twenties, are quite charming.

The Old South Cook Book, from 'the best cooks in Montgomery,' purports to "give a pretty accurate idea of the eating enjoyed in 'the good old days before the war.'" (I have a real feeling they're not talking about WWI.)

Corn fritters, tea biscuits, Lady Baltimore cake, Salt Rising bread, Sally Lunn, beaten biscuit . . . and the Tested Recipes follow much the same pattern.

but the ads are the best part. . .

I'll be off in Burnsville at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival today and tomorrow -- probably without Internet so I won't be responding to comments -- I'll catch up on Sunday!

What Fer Ye?

What fer ye?" the man behind the counter called out back in '75, as we walked into the old hardware store, looking for the bits and pieces that would help us put together our new life on a mountain farm.
There were horse collars and hames, butter molds and milk buckets, horse shoes and horse shoe nails, plow handles and plow points, hoof files and nippers, wood stoves and paint and lard cans -- and mattresses and furniture upstairs. There were seeds and sprays and sprockets, chains and chimney pipe and the Gem Dandy electric churn that became a fixture in my kitchen.

Before the new road opened, making travel to Asheville so easy, Bowman's was the place to go for your hardware needs. There was advice for the asking and there was a wiry little old man who would climb like a spider monkey up the shelves on one wall to fetch down items. Your smaller purchases were wrapped in brown paper and tied with string -- no flimsy plastic bags here! Prices were clearly marked on each item but above the dollars and cents price was a code -- probably the wholesale value – that allowed the staff to know how much latitude they had in dickering with their long-time native-born customers – most of whom ignored the sticker price and opened negotiations with "What'll ye take fer that?"





Our little county seat, the inspiration for Elizabeth's Ransom, is metamorphosing into -- well, I'm not sure exactly what. Long gone are the family-owned drug store, the dime store, the grocery store, even the funeral home. One bank has moved -- one remains. A coffee shop, a taqueria, a computer store, an organic foods store and an assortment of gift shops and galleries have come into being.But the old hardware store endures, with its wood stove in the center where A.J. is keeping warm on a cold day. (A.J., I might tell you, is a dancin' fool -- can dance down 'most all comers on Friday nights at the Depot. And he does a great impersonation of a Soggy Bottom Boy a la O Brother, Where Art Thou? But that’s another story.)

The third picture, taken at the back of the store, is just where I imagined a scene in Art’s Blood: “There had been the occasional encounter in Ransom, the nearby county seat, a somnolent country town that had only recently attained its second stoplight. She’d seen her neighbors most recently in the hardware store where she was purchasing hinges to repair a sagging screen door. All three were gathered around a metal bin, evidently assessing the artistic potential of a mass of nails.”

In the old hardware store the floors are still wooden; merchandise still hangs from the walls. You can buy a wood-burning cook stove like the one in the foreground or an aluminum dish pan or a blue striped gray crock to put down your kraut. There's paint, fishing tackle, guns, ammo, crockery, or a funky cricket fashioned by A.J.’s son from an old pipe wrench, a couple of bolts, and some steel rod bent into legs. And, if you’re lucky, you can still get advice.

What fer ye?