Quilt Pieces

Shirley Noe Swiesz

Sometimes it seems that the world is falling apart but I think it has always seemed that way; we just didn’t have access to the news in the same way that we do now. But it does seem to me that the more we have the less we enjoy it. I remember years ago that Christmas was not mentioned very much until after Thanksgiving. Mark down sales did not start until after Christmas and there was not this mass rush for consumerism. It is a battlefield now of rush, rush, rush and there doesn’t seem to be any enjoyment. I see faces of discontent and faces of pain…not enough money to buy what their kids really want and in many cases not enough money to even take care of their needs…but this is nothing new. Most of us have gone through that at one time or another.

It is a bit scary though to see so many unhappy people at this time of year. What have we lost? I see people cursing in road rage over the slightest of incidents and even a year ago, I did not see this here in Harlan. When I was a child, that phrase ‘road rage’ had never been brought to life. The other day, I was thinking of my brother, Hagert, after he had told me of the horrible cold they endured in Korea during the war. He cannot stand the cold now and although his medicine might be at fault to some degree, I wonder if those long ago years when he was just a boy had something to do with it. He spent his eighteenth birthday on a ship going to Korea. He had probably not been out of Harlan County very much when he volunteered to go into the Army. Many of his friends had gone as well. Ruby Cox’s older brother went in and he never came back.

Kentucky always had plenty of men and women who felt it was their duty to serve their country and they did with all their hearts. I think of how difficult it must have been, and most especially on the holidays, when all they could think about other than survival was being home in front of a good warm fire. The cold, the dirt, the smell of gunpowder and blood in the air…death never took holidays. I’m sure that my brother, young and naïve about life, missed his mother so much. I know he must have thought of going hunting back in the deep woods of Kentucky. He probably thought of going to Granny’s house and sitting around the fireplace with Pap and the days of his youth rambling throughout the woods. He loved to fish and hunt and I am sure the taste of fried sun grannies or squirrel cooked with gravy and sweet potatoes, sweet with natural sugar flowing from them, danced through his young mind.

As Christmas is nearly upon us, I think of my Uncle Daunt who served in World War I and was poisoned with gas, never to be able to live a normal life again and my great grandfather, Jonathon, who fought in the Civil War. Of course you know that my dad fought in World War II. Christmas brings memories to mind of them all, cold, war weary and longing for the Kentucky Mountains, to see them once again, to breathe in the fresh mountain air and to go hunting and fishing, and looking for gin sang. Many of the men, warriors forever, will never get to see these mountains again, for they were killed in action. Did they think of the loved ones back home, these wondrous mountains, the freedom they afforded our youth, when they breathed their last breath? Did they think of Christmas, of sitting around the old Warm Morning, drinking coffee and talking with their parents? Or did they think of the gas station or old country stores that were hangouts for the old and young?

I think perhaps we were afforded more freedom here in the mountains than any other place when we were young. Our mamas never worried when we were in the woods, except for snakes, and we were warned aplenty about them.

My friend from high school, David Gilliam, an avid reader sent me a package this morning. There were three books inside the box. One was a Lodge Cast Iron Cook Book, one was Life Through the Eyes of an Elementary School Student, by Bobby Darrell White. Bobby was born in Gilley Holler in 1942, delivered by Dr. Fields who was a distant relative. I haven’t read it but it seems to focus around Cumberland and the elementary school up on the hill from the high school. The third book was Mother Jones, The Miners’ Angel and I am looking forward to reading it. I have heard a lot about her. I think she is one of the heroes of the mountains in the same way as Mary Breckenridge. I was amazed when I began writing A Great Heart that I had never heard of this wonderful woman who started the Frontier Nursing Service over in Hyden, Ky.

There are so many women in our neck of the woods who are truly heroines and most of them were just trying to survive. It was with great honor that I put a picture of my mother on the front of my book, along with her greatest treasures, her children who survived. Mama was an unsung heroine. She lost three little babies and I don’t think they ever left her mind until the day she died. She was not unusual…there were so many like her: Goldie Lewis, Aunt Katy, Aunt Cassie, Aunt Serrie, Granny Ison, Dorabelle Kellamen, Essie Blair, Gladys Dixon, Ruth Perciful, Mrs. Cox, Granny Halcomb, Aunt Nance, and a thousand others whose name I cannot remember and whose faces have dimmed with time. They lost babies, they lost grown sons to wars or to the coal mines, they lost husbands, and yet they never lost their faith in God. Like Job, they suffered through it all and held onto their strong love for their creator and a better hereafter. This land here in the mountains has not been kind to those who dared to live here, and most especially the women. Sometimes I sit and think of how hard it must have been when this land was first settled, with danger from Indians and others, constantly on the minds of those who came here to make a home. As time went on it became a more difficult hardship for the Indians than the whites and again the women suffered immeasurably. Although it has been argued, I do believe that Indian blood mingles through many of us white people around here. And perhaps many of our survival traits came from them as well.

So this year when you think of Christmas, think of the past ones as well. Remember the young men who were fighting and thought of home at Christmas as they hovered, cold and lonely trying to get warm; think of the ones who left to find work, teenagers still, and cried at Christmas time for they too, were lonely for their family and for the yesterdays when Mama made biscuits with hot jam on cow butter for them. When you think of Christmas, think of the coal miners who spent so much of their lives inside a mountain and become old, bent, and worn long before their time and a perfect Christmas to them, was food and clothes for a bunch of hungry younguns and a fire to keep them warm. And think of the women who worked from daylight to dark for those same younguns and Christmas to her was food and clothes for her little ones, and a warm fire to sit by and read her Bible. Think of Christmas as a day of Grace, a day of memories, a day of thankfulness for having a warm fire and food enough for another long winter. Remember to smile at someone and send up a little prayer for your enemies. Call or write to me anytime…blessings.