Photo: Ileana Johnson 2014 |
As huge snowflakes started dancing in the air, Ray opened up
his memory bag of childhood stories. The first snow of the year was beginning
to stick to the ground and the drab Ohio landscape was turning into a winter
wonderland. But this gentle snow blowing from Lake Erie was just a fuss when
compared to blizzards past.
It was 1950 and a monster snowstorm had buried the family up
to their collective waist in fluffy whiteness. The small Medina Hollow in West
Virginia was far from the maddening world of civilization but this time it
resembled a lunar white desert. The roads were inaccessible for an entire week
before bulldozers from the county showed up to free them from complete and
utter isolation.
The feeling of despair never entered the minds of these
resilient , intrepid, and self-sufficient country folk who used the Sears and
Roebuck catalog as toilet paper and an outhouse dangling over the creek. Sometimes
it was washed away by the swollen waters and had to be salvaged from the mud
downstream and drug back to its stilts.
The cows were trapped in the shed when huge snow banks slid
off the roof and closed off the only possible exit and entrance to feed and
water the cows - their source of milk, butter, and cheese. The boys dug a
tunnel through the snow to get the Holsteins out to the water.
The fact that they were cut off from the world by miles and tons
of snow did not frighten them. They only went to the store in the nearby town
of Ripley once a month to buy salt, flour, coffee, and sugar – everything else
they grew and canned themselves. They had no refrigeration and electricity; a
building dug into the hill, well-insulated with 8 inch walls of sawdust, kept
everything cold and well-preserved.
Apples, pears, potatoes, and onions were covered with straw. The milk
was kept fresh in the spring. The flowing water was the magical place that
sustained life - it was their cooler, fishing hole, the water source for
animals and humans, and their Saturday bathtub before church.
In his typical West Virginia brogue, Ray reminisced about the
yearly ritual of breaking the soil, planting the garden, weeding it, watering
it, and the pig they always butchered on Thanksgiving Day. They stayed up all
day and half the night, up to their elbows in blood, meat, and guts. “We saved
everything but the squeal and we would have saved it too if we could have
caught it. And we cleaned the guts in the river and made sausage sleeves out of
them. We even used the pig’s tail to grease the griddle.”
The men dipped the hogs in a barrel to scald the hair off of
them and then laid them on a sled, saved the liver, the heart, and other parts
to make sausages or fry them. I
wondered why they did not take a blow
torch to singe the pig’s hair like my Grandpa used to do at Christmas time when
he butchered the family’s hog. But then again, I always found hairs in the
pig’s hide when I was trying to chew Grandpa’s specialty head cheese.
The large family survived during spring and summer by
growing vegetables, eating unwashed tomatoes right out of the patch and raising
chicken and collecting eggs. When it came time to cook a chicken, they would
hang it live on the clothes line and cut its head off to keep it from flopping
around and bruising the meat.
“It was not easy then, that’s for sure,” he said pensively.
“We did not go to town much, we sold some eggs, we sold cream from Jersey and
Holstein cows’ milk, but we did not buy much.”
They made sauerkraut in steeping barrels, stomping salted
cabbage with their feet. When the sauerkraut was ready, they washed the salt
off. “We did not know any better - that was normal to us.”
Every morning all kids had to get up at 4:30 a.m. and do
their chores first before they went to school. Out in the middle of a field,
they drank water from the creek and used nature’s bathroom, with special
markers for the spot, no sophistication or hygiene worries.
Many kids dropped out of school too soon but Ray’s brothers
stayed through 12th grade because their parents stressed the
importance of school, “reading, writing, and Route 21.” Route 21 took many kids
out of West Virginia to the “promised land” in Ohio in search of jobs. Medina
was so small it only had a grocery store and a church, no chance for employment.
Ripley was the big city with one traffic light.
Some kids were so poor, they brought raccoon sandwiches to
school. Parents sent them to school just to get them out of the house until
they got in fights and tried to beat the teacher and the cops took them back
home.
Kids wore overshoes to handle the deep mud. When the school
bus would get stuck in spite of the spare gravel on the road, children had to
get out in ankle-deep mud and extricate the bus by pushing it out of the ruts.
Nowadays there would be a lawsuit if kids pushed the bus.
It’s a wonder Joan married Ray after seeing all the spitting,
tobacco and snuff-chewing men in the main square by the Courthouse. People
slept with their dogs in bed and the pig underneath the bed because winters
were so fierce and cold. Ray’s uncle was considered rich by most area residents
because he owned a jewelry store in Ripley, trading watches.
Joan, Ray’s wife, a city girl from Ohio, was appalled how
people lived in West Virginia. She must have loved Ray very much to stick
around for 55 years. And Ray’s economical lifestyle became their trademark.
Living simply, God, and family remained their guiding light.
Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014
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