Perspective and thanks-giving
Writer, traveler and international woman of mystery Buffy Holt recently paid a vist back to the West Virginia mountains where she got her start. This trip back she received some more timeless wisdom from her nearly-timeless grandfather, "Pa." Pa still chops the wood to heat his home and carries jugs of water from the spring into the house. He also fills his coal bins and freezers and works hard to provide for his family's needs. Hard times? Not so much.
I thought, again, My grandfather shouldn’t have to have it so hard and asked him “Do you ever sit around and wonder at how different things are? Back when you were young and now. How different things could have been or might still be?”
This is what he told me:
“You know, a lot of things have changed. A lot of people aint around any more. I think about that a lot. Sometimes. But it don’t bother me like all the talk going on now. What bothers me is people saying ‘I don’t know how we’re gonna make it. Times is so tough’.
“I can’t understand it. Everybody talking about the hard times we’re in. They don’t know a thing about it. That’s the trouble. Talking about hard times and such. They don’t have no idea what hard times is. People starving in other parts of the world. Let me tell you, there’s all kinds of things that start to not-matter real fast when you can’t put food in your belly.
“Buddy I know about that stuff. I aint kidding you. Back when we was raised up there was times there wasn’t things to eat. And winters! You aint never seen such winters. You couldn’t even walk in the snow it was so deep. I remember wearing old thin shirts. Shoes you had to strap on cause they wasn’t nothing much but bottoms. I seen many a day where all there was to eat was a little meat grease and some green onions. I had that a lot. And it tasted real good too.”
He laughed.
“It was years ago. Man, that comes back to me whenever I see people filling their plates so full they gotta throw half of it away. Then standing there, shaking their heads and rubbing their bellies and talking about how hard times is.
“Why, I never had it so good. Neither have they. They just don’t know it.”
It reminded me of my grandfather and his life, and of the November when he was a little boy when the family farmhouse in the Ozark foothills burned, leaving him, his parents and his many brothers and sisters "homeless". They moved into the barn, my grandfather and his brothers sleeping in the loft where there were finger-sized spaces between many of the boards; when they would wake up in the morning there was often snow on their blankets. It was hard and it was discouraging, but there wasn't anything that dismaying about it: you just did what you needed to do to survive.
Buffy's account also reminded me of a poem by Richard E. McMullen:
One Time My Dad
One time my dad said to me, I don’t
see why people complain about how hard they work
or how tired they are. Nobody works hard but
farmers, miners, lumberjacks and foundry workers.
This was before power tools, tractors, and such things, and all
the work was done by hand. When farmers in Upstate New York
left to get away from the stones, what
they found in Southern Michigan were: more stones.
As they cleared the land, the horses hauled the black walnut trees
and stumps to the side of the field and the farmers burned them.
Black walnut was no good to them, too hard to work.
Grandpa Conde, when he finally left the farm and moved
to Milan, got a job in the foundry and walked to work
and back, six days a week, 12 hours
a day, for 50 cents a day. He thought
he was sitting pretty. Whenever the noon whistle blew, people
would say, Well, Hell’s out for lunch. But he would sit
down in a cool place and eat his lunch.
Once, when she was a little girl, Aunt Ida
asked her father, who was working in his garden, why
he worked so hard and wasn’t he tired? Grandpa
straightened up from his hoeing and answered: I never get tired.