Originally published August 8, 2023 on Facebook: Journey of a Mountain Woman
Quilt Pieces
Shirley Noe Swiesz
We called her ‘grandma’ out of respect but she was no kin atall. In 1959 she was in her nineties, so she was born around the 1870’s. She still had a Scottish burr from her parents who came from Scotland before she was born. I listened to her talk for hours, but I never knew her name...just ‘Grandma’. She was a tiny woman not more than five feet tall and she walked around on fragile bowed legs.
She seldom watched their tiny black and white television but she liked to watch the evening news. I think it was David Brinkley and Chet Huntley. She liked old timey music and would hum to herself. She spent her days sitting on the porch in the spring and summer and quilting in the long winter days.
She told me about yesterday...those days when her large family was young. She told me about her son getting killed in the coal mines when he was about sixteen. He had gotten a job in a mine around Harlan and stayed with his older sister who had married a miner. They lived in a coal camp. She couldn’t remember the name of it but she remembered how her son’s hair was the shade of corn silks when the corn was ripe.
She told me that she had had eleven children, the first one when she was sixteen and the last one when she was thirty-six. Four babies died before they were a month old...either at birth or a few days later and one died of diphtheria when she was three. Then her son was killed in the mine, and another daughter died in childbirth. She was blessed though, for God had left her with the remaining four and they loved her dearly.
Her husband who was ten years older than she was, died when she was seventy. He had spent his life first in the lumber woods and then in the coal mines. They had moved to Harlan in 1925 right after her son had died. She remembered it well. They moved into a coal camp in a two room house. Later he was made a boss man and they got a four room house. The house was plain and simple but it was nicer than the one they had lived in in Manchester.
She told me about her handsome husband...his hair as black as the coal he dug, and how he was a ‘mule skinner’ and could cuss up a storm but never at her or the children.
She told of her parents who were poor when they came to this country with not much more than the clothes on their backs and with hard work they saved enough money to buy some land and build a log cabin. Her father had a trade...he was a smithy...blacksmith and her mother was a wonderful seamstress and sewed for the few that could afford it.
She had two brothers and one of them followed in his father’s footsteps and became a blacksmith and the other was a woodsman and eventually became a coal miner. They were both gone now and she missed them.
There were days when she talked about the home her husband built for her. It was back in a holler and she loved it. It was a good sized log cabin. Each year she had a big garden and there were enough apple trees to dry a right smart of apples to last for the winter. She had planted them when they were not more than two feet tall. Her mother had given them to her. She would dry beans in the summer and hole up cabbage to last the winter.
When her husband died, she had walked out of the holler for help. It was a cold winter day with almost a foot of snow on the ground. Her children had fussed and fussed about them living so far away from any neighbors.
They fussed for the next twenty years and finally she gave in and sold her land and moved in with her kids, staying three months with each one of them. She knew that the trees would be cut and the coal stripped from the earth. She tried not to cry when she told me about it.
“I think they forgot that they had once lived without a bathroom or even electricity. They forgot that they drank from a gourd and had to carry the water in each night. Hit never kilt a one of them to work hard.” And then she thought about it. “Except my boy. If he hadn’t agone inta that mine, he would be alive still.” She sat still for a long time and I could feel her pain.
She lived frugally although I knew she had a lot of money from the sale of timber and coal rights but she still wore her faded cotton dresses and cotton stockings and lace up shoes. Sometimes she would slip me a couple of dollars or a pretty handkerchief, smelling of a cedar chest, or a string of old pearls. The pearls had belonged to her daughter who had died so long ago in childbirth.
I asked her who delivered her babies and she said an old midwife and the neighbor women. There were no doctors close enough to come to them. “Oh, let me think,” she said, “Yes, one was delivered by a doctor when we lived in a coal camp. He was drunk though and the little one died. I never trusted a doctor adder that one.” “How could I have pert near forgot that?” She said, mostly to herself.
Her eyes would water over and tears flow down her wrinkled checks when she mentioned her dead children. I could feel her pain, but I was young and could not fathom the depth of it.
I spent many happy hours with this old woman. I would quilt with her in the winter and sit with her outside in the summer, swinging quietly in the swing. Sometimes in my dreams I go back and visit her. In my mind’s eye I can see her grey hair, bundled up in a knot in the back, and her arthritic hands weaving in and out of her quilts.
I had left home when she died, but my tears fell when Mama wrote me the news. Like the grandmother I had lost, I loved this old woman who had worked so hard and loved so much. There is nothing quite so special as those old mountain women of yesterday.
Well, it has been rainy up here on Sukie Ridge. It hasn’t stopped an occasional bear from visiting us or the nightly raccoons and opossums, though. The other night a young deer, still with its’ spots, ran up the hill. The squirrels dance on the power lines and the crows visit me regularly.
Well, smile at someone and take the time to pray for your enemy. Blessings.