A Call to the Soul

I was born and raised in northern Ohio, though my roots are in southeast Kentucky.  Well, that's not exactly accurate; most of my ancestors came across the Smoky Mountains from North Carolina, some of them having the mixed blood of the Cherokee Nation.  I spent summers on my grandmother's mountain farm in Harlan county, Kentucky.  To say it was primitive is a serious understatement; Granny didn't have running water (oh yes, we ran and got it from the spring).  I remember her cooking on an old coal stove, helping her stir the blackberry jam she made every summer.  She did have electricity, enough to have lights, a refrigerator, and an electric wringer-type washer.  It wasn't until later years that she finally got a proper cook stove, but we had to run outside on the other end of the house to "throw the switch" to turn the power on to it.

Granny had her issues, as most of us do, but I learned a lot from her.  She truly lived off the land, raising chickens and hogs, and she always had a milk cow.  She could coax an abundant garden out of the poorest of soil, and set to canning everything she could get her hands on.  I remember the root cellar under the house where snakes would crawl to look for mice - I'm talking rattlesnakes, copperheads, black snakes.  A creepy, spidery place.  Her corn crib was full, her chicken coop cackling, her root cellar was packed with jars, and there always meat in the smoke house.

To say that Granny loved flowers does not do her justice.  That is one of the most striking memories I have of her; she could spit a seed into the ground and sprout a rose.  She had a beautiful asparagus bush that was 10 feet tall.  She would put old tires around her "pinies" (peonies) to keep us kids from running them over.  She was an old woman of the mountains.  Fierce, proud, hard-working - those are the most important lessons I learned from her.

So what does this have to do with a call to the soul?  I long for the mountains.  When I visit my family there, I can close my eyes and smell that smell that only comes from the Appalachian Mountains...a mixture of pine, sandy soil, fishing worms, and wild mountain flowers.  That's as close as I can come to describing it.

I love the notion of living off the land.  I love raising my chickens, working in my garden, planting my herbs and flowers, being outside in the sunny breezes.  Where does that come from?  I wasn't raised to it, I inherited it.  My cousin Pat and I agree - it is in our genes, in the very stuff that makes up the fabric of the descendents of the mountains.  The bluegrass music, clogging, telling tall tales, taking a dip in the cold swimming hole, running down a headless chicken to fry it up for supper, fluffy biscuits with gravy for breakfast, wading in the "branch" of the river, chasing salamanders and butterflies.

I lived in Europe for many years, and I heard the call there too.  It came winging down from the heights of the castles and the alps, wafting on the folk music, lingering in the smiles of the old people who were probably distant cousins somehow.  I heard it in the lyrical voices of the different languages, the aroma of the hearty food of the countryside, the echo of the footsteps on the ancient stones of our ancestors.  Many people don't hear the call.  Those of us who want to remember, and carry on the traditions of our ancestors, hold tight to the call and think of our ancestors who gave us so much.