Bloggers note

My Blogger’s note is an audio experiment. My instructors and classmates have encouraged me to add audio to my posts. Here is my first trial:

This house. Our first visit would have been sometime in the fall of 1968. Our last visit would have been in August of 1969 just before graduation and our move to Hayesville in the western mountains of North Carolina.

I remember feeling welcome. Beyond these memories, my pictures and the music I recorded will be our memory.

Memories – the Burchetts

We were totally unprepared. Robin and I took our leap into a new life – into a new world for us. Everyone grows up learning of the life and culture and work around them. Chicago, South Bend, the wealthy suburbs, large universities. We’d learned the wrong stuff to live in the mountains. After our initial summer classes in the Teacher Corps, we were assigned to the Little Milligan Elementary School nearly 35 miles out of Johnson City. The school was in a remote valley in the eastern mountains of Tennessee near the North Carolina border. Instead of continuing to live in Johnson City near the university, we chose to move to a small mountain house very close to the school. Our house looked very much like the Burchetts’ – except we had a bathroom. Of course I took my cameras and we built a darkroom where I carried buckets of water to a home-made sink.

We ventured out along the roads near the school. We had a 4-wheel drive Land Rover. The real thing you see in safari movies. I could navigate the roads, the driveways, dirt tracks, streams, even farm fields. I don’t remember how we met the Burchetts. Perhaps Faye was in my 6th grade science class. She’s third from the left. Vern, the family patriarch, is on the right.

They had a small plot of tobacco. Some family lived in the trailer but we always visited in the main house beyond. The cars changed almost every visit.

Inside this home, Robin and I had our first real Appalachian country cooked dinner. Probably some ham. Cornbread. Taters and gravy. Coffee, lots of coffee. Talking and visiting. Hearing the Jack tales and stories of farming and life. We loved listening to Vern.

I quickly learned that I didn’t know enough to be a farmer. Robin and I learned that tobacco farming required a lot of knowledge – not school knowledge but growing-up knowledge. It was also hard work. Especially when it was time to hitch the horses to the sledge.

Inside work

We didn’t help inside. We were guests. The women talked as they cleaned up; Robin would join in but wasn’t to help. We didn’t help with the laundry either. I’d never seen laundry hung up in winter. I don’t remember my Chicago family ever had a laundry line; I think Robin may have had one when she was too small to reach it.

Outside work

Unlike inside work, we were allowed to help outside. I helped (well, mostly watched) hitching the horses to the sledge. I also took lots of pictures.

Both of us helped with breaking up the sod and working the ground. Then with fertilizing the beds. We tried hoeing. Later in the year we tried picking the tobacco. Sticky hands. Hard work. Earl took it all in stride. Wow, could he get the work done!

Tobacco farming was a 13 months a year job. They were preparing the seedbeds as they were carrying the dried crop to the sales barn. We never learning to sort the leaves by color and grade, nor to roll the leaves. We helped load the pickup.

Food for the table

It was here that I saw my first hog killing. I turned and vomited. They laughed at me. I turned back and and continued shooting. I still remember …

As the hog was prepared for the butcher.

So next August, when we left for the mountains of North Carolina, there was still much to learn, but we got a great start …

There was music

Sometimes we stayed after dinner. It was a treat. Bluegrass. The whole family “made music.” This also was new. I grew up listening to my dad’s classical music on 78 rpm records. By high school, I listened to Elvis and the Beatles on clear channel rock stations. In college we stayed up all night listening to the blues. But home-grown bluegrass was new.

Listening. That’s Robin in the lower right corner, looking at me.

Of course it was hot as the wood stove provided a lot of heat. Here’s Vern telling me to stay away from the open outside door so I wouldn’t catch a cold.

Here, everyone played an instrument – or two or three. Everyone sang. Vern and Theresa led the singing.

Again, you can listen as you continue to read …

I don’t remember the serious expressions. Perhaps being photographed and recorded changed the usual humor I remember. Vern and Theresa always led the group …

Concentration. Much greater than I remember …

Earl’s smile is what I remember.

The previous two pictures are unusual. They rarely played by themselves. Instead, practice was together …

Changed instruments, changed partners, but always together.

This remembrance, retrieved from my pictures, the recording notes, the recordings, and from my heart sure brought back wonderful memories.