From Whom Do You Come?

     I come from country people, though I am not really a country person myself. When my parents moved to the city (or the suburbs of a city), they ended generations of country life for my specific family line. I don't think they ever got over it. When their children were grown and gone, they promptly moved back to the small town they'd moved from twenty years before. And then, just a few years later, they moved back to the country outright--complete with land, a barn, chickens, and even a few horses. For all those years in the city, they'd never really felt at home.

     They'd grown up in the country on neighboring farms. Their houses were a mile apart, and they were each other's closest neighbor. When my father started working for the telephone company as a young man in the late 1950s, he ran a single telephone line between their two houses and hooked up a crank telephone at each end so that my two grandmothers, who were friends, could call each other and have a little conversation without having to walk a mile to do so.
     That primitive telephone is a fitting symbol for the nature of their everyday lives. It would have been one of the most modern things in their two households. There was no running water and no indoor plumbing. Their water came from a well in the front yard. They took baths in galvanized washtubs, the kind of thing people fill with ice and beer or sodas at a party these days. And a trip to the toilet required a walk down the path to the outhouse, which had to be shoveled out occasionally for obvious reasons.

    When my grandfather--my father's father--started farming in the early 1900s, he didn't have a tractor. He used a workhorse hitched to a plow, or whatever horse-drawn farming equipment was required. I used to see the old rusted pieces of ancient tools and machinery sitting here and there like skeletons of a by-gone day whenever I'd go to visit the place as a boy. They grew tobacco as a cash crop, because this was Kentucky, and Kentucky was a major tobacco state back then. But for the most part, they grew everything they ate, whether that was vegetable or meat. They canned the vegetables and smoked the meat to have food for days when nothing was growing. On my father's side at least, from what I've heard, they were good at it. They worked very hard and they made a living of it.

     That's how my parents grew up, and in that way they were closer to their ancestry than I have ever been. When my father decided to take a job with the telephone company instead of staying on the farm, he broke with the tradition. His life was more comfortable, I believe, because of that choice.

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