For a vacationing grandchild, few places held as much fascination for me as the 60-acre farm in eastern Kentucky where my mother grew up. There were ponds to fish, trees to climb, targets to shoot, woods to roam and, usually, lots of cousins to play with.
However, it is not the lap of luxury. Even I must admit it is impressive only compared to what was there before it and for the sheer exertion required to scratch it into being.
You could say the same thing about the people who lived there, I suppose.
The Wilson homeplace was in Rowan County, at the very end of Lower Oak Grove Road, a shoulderless, one-and-a-half-lane byway that climbs 50 feet up a steep slope, then high-wires three miles along a ridgeline with so many twists and turns that it seems 30 miles long.
Back when everyone farmed these hillsides, you might have to pull aside twice or thrice before arriving at Granny and Papaw’s, to let slip past a tractor or logging truck coming from the opposite direction. Stick your head out the window during such a stop, and you would be gobsmacked by virid hills that sprawl beneath God’s cerulean vault. Across that vast expanse, you would not likely see more than a single farmhouse at any compass point, unless your eye caught the glint of a tin roofline on a distant ridge — maybe a mile away as the crow flies but 10 as the tractor rolls. Nothing would stand between you and there but acres of slanting fields and dozens of sure-footed cows.
Lower Oak Grove Road chugs along like a jaunty roller-coaster, past McBreyer Cemetery, then Lambert Cemetery, then the Hall Family Cemetery, the lineage of the buried drawing closer to the trunk of the Wilsons’ family tree as the road draws closer to their homeplace. But after all that fuss, Lower Oak Grove Road seems to simply give up at the finish line, as if pantingly out of breath, melting from existence just a few feet from the Wilsons’ front porch.
That is to say, the farm is almost literally in the middle of nowhere.
The nearest town of any size — the county seat, Morehead — has a hospital and a university, but it is a 30-minute drive away along winding mountain roads. Stand on that porch and look around, and you will see nothing but cleared hillsides palisaded by oaks and paralleling ridgelines. Scream at the top of your lungs, and no neighbor will hear you.
For many years, the final mile of Lower Oak Grove Road was paved only in gravel, so that each approaching vehicle was announced well ahead of its arrival by a low, growling hum that echoed through the timbers. It was the closest thing to a doorbell the Wilsons ever owned.
Indeed, they did not own much of anything apart from that farm.
In 1925, my great-grandfather, Burl Wilson, purchased the denuded timberland from his brother. Lee Wilson had owned it just long enough to fashion a corn crib with lumber that he salvaged from a neighbor’s abandoned shanty and a two-room farmhouse that he framed with railroad ties dragged from a nearby spurline. Those railroad tracks, also abandoned, once carried ash and poplar timbers to a staging area for logging trucks.
Because railroad ties of that time were typically no more than about 8 feet long, the ceilings in that farmhouse were claustrophobically low, so that men folk of any substantial height reflexively stooped as they walked through the front door. It was like entering a tent or a child’s playhouse, and for many years, it was scarcely better outfitted.
Electricity didn’t arrive until the 1940s, and it was several years more before the family could afford an electric range to replace the wood-burning cooking stove. A party-line telephone was installed in the 1950s, and a pump to bring water from the well to the kitchen sink did not follow until the early 1960s. There was no bathroom until I was about 5. Before that, the “facilities” amounted to a wash basin in the kitchen and a two-seat outhouse by the chicken coop. For a summer-vacationing kid, that location made pooping fun. For full-time residents who had to trek through the snow to relieve themselves … not so much.
My papaw, Oliver Wilson, had just turned 7 when his father, Burl, and his mother, Mahala Hall Wilson, moved the family to the homeplace they always referred to as “the Ridge.” Papaw’s sister, Vada Mae, was about to turn 13 and lived there only about three years before marrying in 1928. However, Burl, Mahala and Oliver resided there on the Ridge for the rest of their lives, save brief periods in hospitals, nursing homes or the Army.
And in an era in which Appalachian farmers still plowed with mules and needed large families to work the land, the three of them hewed from the hillside a homeplace where five generations of Wilsons lived at one time or another. Gradually, they added a barn, a garage, a smokehouse and other outbuildings. They expanded the farmhouse until two rooms had become seven. They upgraded from mules to a tractor in the late 1950s and fed themselves almost entirely from their garden, supplementing the vegetables they grew with the chicken and pork they raised.
“We ate so well, we had no idea we were poor,” my Uncle Kenny is fond of saying.
But alas, the Wilsons had to scrape to get by. Their only source of cash came from the sale of a fall tobacco crop and the odd jobs held by Burl, who was nearly illiterate, and Oliver, who quit school after the sixth grade.
Despite the brevity of his formal education, Oliver was as bright as he was hard-working. A natural storyteller and knowledgeable about local politics, Papaw loved to hold court during family gatherings, and he always commanded an audience. He was not loud, melodramatic or overstated in his manner. Neither was he intimidating, rowdy or tetchy.
He was simply magnetic.
What was true of his personality was true of his physical traits. He was of average height and build, yet eye-catching. His dark hair and olive complexion imparted a rugged handsomeness. His hands were sinewed vice-grips, with meaty palms and black hairs sprouting between his knuckles. His fists could crush walnuts. Yet his fingers were adroit, and I loved to watch him at delicate tasks, such as tying a fishing rig or cupping one of the Winstons he plucked from the metal cigarette case in his shirt pocket. His hands, like the rest of him, did not move quickly. He was fluid. Smooth. Steady.
He was a serious man, living a hardscrabble life, yet there was a hint of whimsy about him, too. I remember a picture of him with a broad grin on his face and Granny’s wig on his head. In fact, he always seemed to be wearing something on his head, and whether it was a fedora or a snap-back cap, his hat always had a slight tilt to it.
The slant seemed to complement the slight stoop of his posture and the subtle hitch in his giddyup, which were the result of troublesome discs in his spine. The defect only made him seem more invincible, however. Indeed, his back trouble was caused by an accident suffered in his youth, when the mule hitched to his walk-behind plow spooked and pulled him over a cliff before he could untangle himself from the drive line.
Papaw didn’t have to growl for you to know he was tough. Needless to say, I revered my Papaw. So did Mom.
She was the oldest of Papaw’s biological children, but my Uncle Jack — her half-brother — was older by several years. He arrived at the homeplace with his mother, the widow Leona Olive Williams. Like Papaw, she was from Rowan County, but unlike her future husband, she explored broader horizons. Granny worked for a time in a secretarial pool in Washington, D.C., and also lived in Springfield, Ohio, where she met her first husband, Otis Brooks.
However, five years into their marriage, Otis developed a brain tumor. Granny nursed him the best she could, but he died in 1944, two days short of his 26th birthday.
Granny and Jack moved back to Rowan County, where she met Oliver. Family lore is split as to whether their first encounter took place in a general store or a dentist’s office, but whichever was the case, Granny and Papaw were married on July 29, 1945, just more than 14 months after Otis’ death.
Papaw took Granny to that subsistence farm at the end of a gravel road, and my petite but plucky grandmother worked shoulder to shoulder with her husband and in-laws, stripping tobacco, stacking hay and canning the garden’s yield.
Jack was just 4 when Granny remarried. Papaw treated him like a son, and soon Jack had siblings. Mom was born in October 1946, Aunt Ina in March 1950, Uncle Kenny in April 1951 and Aunt Vada in March 1953. That hospital in Morehead did not open until 1963 and probably would have been too far of a drive, anyway, so Granny gave birth to each of them on the farm without doctors or drugs.
As one might guess of a family born in such relative seclusion, all of the siblings were close. Mom and Ina, for instance, were like twins born four years apart. They bore the closest resemblance of all the Wilson kids. They both married men named Glenn and both had two children, who also were close in age. Both had a talent for painting and liked to depict rustic themes. And more than once, they sent each other identical greeting cards for the same holiday.
Yet Mom seemed most closely cleaved to her youngest sister, Vada. Perhaps that was because she was long dispirited by a circumstance with which Mom was well-acquainted and thus well-positioned to help her through. You see, Vada wanted a child more than anything, but after four years of marriage — roughly the same length of time between my parents’ wedding and my adoption — she still did not have one.
While Mom had difficulty conceiving, for Vada, conception was a threat to her very life. She had severe juvenile-onset diabetes — over time, it claimed nearly all of her vision, both of her legs and, finally, her life. Vada’s doctors advised her against bearing children because of her illness. When she became pregnant, anyway, in the winter of 1977, her physicians feared that neither Vada, nor my expected cousin Kelli would survive childbirth.
I still remember the hushed phone conversations between Mom and Vada in the latter days of her pregnancy and the day in May 1978 when we put my tear-worn mother on a plane to Kentucky, unsure whether we were sending her to celebrate new life or to help plan a funeral. I also remember the relief and elation of Mom’s phone call to tell us Vada made it through the delivery and that although the pure oxygen piped into Kelli’s incubator had likely impaired the vision in her left eye, my new cousin was otherwise healthy.
Unlike their father and grandfather, the Wilson kids all completed high school. Mom even had a scholarship offer from Morehead State when she graduated. But she also had a decision to make — college or marriage — and it was a tough one. Mom grew up wanting to be a school teacher, but she had been working on Dad for a while, too.
Mom first encountered Elden Glenmore Kidd at Elliottville School. He was a year ahead of her, but they caught each other’s eye. Mom asked a friend to ask Dad if he liked her, and at about the same time, Dad asked a friend to ask Mom if she liked him.
When both friends reported back with a “yes,” Mom and Dad had officially become boyfriend and girlfriend.
Their relationship went so well that a year or so later, they worked up the nerve to speak to each other. Dad was playing for the Elliottville School’s ninth-grade basketball team, and Mom was helping operate the manual scoreboard. One day during pre-game warm-ups, Dad chased down a ball that rolled toward the scoreboard where Mom was stationed.
“Hi. You keeping score?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mom blushed.
Dad smiled, then dribbled awkwardly back into his team’s three-man weave. If this keeps up, we might go on a date in a year or two, he thought.
In high school, Mom and Dad dated other people here and there but always found their way back to each other. It is fortunate that Dad fit right in with Mom’s family, because they were around a lot. Their dates typically consisted of Dad taking Mom to his house after church for a few hours, and Papaw and Granny coming by to get her a while later. Mom was a quintessential rules-follower, but Dad roused in her a faint glimmer of rebelliousness — a few times, she went for a ride in his car or made a trip to the drive-in movie without telling her parents! Usually, however, my Aunt Ina chaperoned their dates from the back seat of Dad’s old Falcon. My Uncle Kenny saw his first drive-in movie from the same back seat when he filled in for Ina.
Eventually, Mom and Dad were allowed to venture out on their own, although their solo dates did not always go as planned. Once, they skipped school to drive to an amusement park across the state line in West Virginia but arrived to find it was closed. (The park, not West Virginia.)
Another time, they heard a thud as Dad drove Mom back to the Ridge long after dark. He stopped to investigate, and when he opened the car door, he was sprayed in the face by a skunk. Dad got violently sick, and when he finally got Mom home, Papaw was waiting up to find out why they were late. Hearing the story — well, smelling it, really — Papaw took pity. He doused Dad with tomato juice to subdue the stench, then drove him home in his pick-up.
For their next date, Mom and Dad drove the Falcon to a creek bed to soap it up and rinse out the interior. Dad still smelled like tomato-y skunk, and Mom was still devoted to him.
After Dad graduated from high school, he moved four hours away to Springfield, to live with his sister, Bernice, and her husband, Edgar. Dad’s brother-in-law worked on the factory floor at Robbins & Myers, a pump manufacturer, and he helped his new in-law land a job there driving a forklift. On weekends, Dad drove back to Kentucky and continued to date Mom, who still had one year of high school remaining.
During one of those trips, Dad popped the question. That left Mom with a decision – accept his proposal or that scholarship to Morehead State.
Mom chose Dad over college, and I think she chose wisely. You just don’t cast aside the one guy who can find your house in the boondocks and who will joust with skunks to get there.
Plus, Dad was earning a princely $1.61 an hour at Robbins & Myers.
Mom and Dad married in the living room of the house where she grew up, on July 10, 1965. Vada and Mom’s cousin Diane made a cake for the occasion, though the summer heat melted the frosting. So my parents ate quickly, then dashed off to Ohio, where Dad had rented an apartment for them.
Mom took a job in the glove department of Wrenn’s Department Store in downtown Springfield. When each paycheck arrived, she bought something new for their home — a pan one week, a bowl or measuring cup the next. They allowed themselves one splurge — Dad purchased a 1965 GTO and tried without success to teach Mom to drive a standard-shift vehicle.
Within a few years, they had put away enough money for a down payment on a cute little house in Springfield’s best school district. They were trying for a family. Mom was not yet pregnant, but she was sure it would be just a matter of time.
Four months later, however, their life was upended when Uncle Sam called Dad’s draft number. It broke their hearts, but they saw little choice but to sell their house and most of their belongings, putting the rest in storage. Mom, dejected and scared about what might await her husband in Vietnam, went back to Rowan County to live with Granny and Papaw and to figure out what to do next. After Dad dropped her off, she flung herself on the couch and cried for the next 24 hours.
But the next afternoon, Mom heard a low, growling hum echoing through the timbers along Lower Oak Grove Road. She scrambled to the porch to see Dad’s car panting toward her. As it turns out, Dad was legally blind in one eye, and the Army could find no use for him.
Mom and Dad were out a cute little house in Springfield’s best school district, but they were in each other’s arms again.
Their plans to start a family were back on, too.
You know of my parents’ struggle to conceive. That was one of several challenges punctuating an otherwise happy marriage. That skunked-up forklift driver was promoted to foreman, then to manufacturing engineer. Dad also attended college on the side and stopped just a few hours short of his degree.
Mom squeezed in more schooling, too, even with two children on her hip. She studied accounting at a technical college after Dad was transferred to Columbia, S.C., near the end of my first-grade year. She worked as a bank teller, an elementary school secretary, and ultimately as an accountant and human resources officer for a brick manufacturer.
As a result of my parents’ hard work, my sister and I enjoyed much more material comfort as children than either of our parents. We often planted a garden, but most of our food came from the grocery store. Our houses always had electric ranges and telephones, and our kitchens and bathrooms always had running water. That might not impress you, but when I consider where my parents came from and the exertion required to scratch their family into being, their accomplishments seem pretty grand to me.
But material trappings should never be what impresses us most. Because the things that seem most concrete are things not guaranteed to last. Families can lose farms.
They can lose Papaws and mothers, too.
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