Aunt Lorena Again

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I'm thinking about my Aunt Lorena lately because I'm going to the Creasy family reunion in West Virginia at the end of this month and she'll be there along with my cousins. She's in her nineties now and the last of my dad's 10 brothers and sisters. This is a great picture of her looking out over the hills of WV. What was she thinking about?

Grandma's Grave

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My grandma, Rose Zanna Brown Creasy, is buried in her beloved mountains in the cemetery at Alderson Church in Nicholas County, West Virginia, not far from where she raised her 10 children. This is me a few years back visiting during a family reunion. (Also see the 11/03/10 post.)

Graveyards were more important in the past. They were a place to visit the memory of family members that have crossed over, to reflect on the circle of life, to rest and meditate and pray, to mourn, to tell family stories, to recharge. And they were right there - not set apart, but outside the church window as you worshipped each Sunday. Just part of life...

Childhood in the Mountains

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That's me in the center at eight years old with my hand on Snowball's bridle and my arm around my sister. And those are the neighborhood kids, Becky and John Miller. This is what we did for fun on my grandparents' Nicholas County WV farm - hung out and messed around. No TV, no phone, no handheld games, no computers. Just us and 50 acres of rolling hills and farm animals. It was a ball!

Looks like today it's pony time and John gets the first ride. I'm guessing this was after church and we begged my mom and their mom to let them stop and play. My sister and I changed clothes but Becky's still in a dress and her good coat and it looks like it might be late fall but a sunny day. In the background, you can see the little house I wrote about last time.

This is childhood at its best. I'd love to jump into the picture for one more lovely day.

Grandpa Making Molasses

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How the heck do you make molasses and what is it anyway? First you grow sugar cane, of course, then the stalks are fed through a mill, the liquid drained off, cooked down and put in glass jars. It makes a sweet, syrupy, dark liquid that can be used as a sweetener. Here's a great WV blog out of Beaver with people that still keep up the tradition:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/docs.htm?docid=19003 (You'll need to paste this in your URL.)

Notice their mill was turned in the author's childhood by a mule walking in circles and today is powered by a tractor. I'm wondering what my grandpa used. I do remember molasses, though...on biscuits and pancakes and in gingerbread and cookies. Yum!

Little House in Nicholas County

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Look at this cute little house. One year when I was a girl, my dad built a house down in the low meadow on my grandparents' property. It was maybe half a block from their farm house. I say "half a block" because I live in Chicago but no one said that back then. Maybe they said it was "down aways" from the big house. Because I was a girl, I thought it was farther than it actually was, so I might have said it was a "fur piece" from one house to the other.

But imagine this, that my dad built this house on his own - wired it, put in the plumbing. Amazing! Just whipped it up. I remember it had a "breezeway," an open area between the main house and the garage where we had a swing and where breezes would actually waft through. And we seemed to always have kittens frolicking there too. Not to mention that I could go out the back, climb the fence, jump the little creek and go up the hill to visit grandma.

It's still there today.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Ye Old Homestead

This was my grandparents' house in Nicholas County where I spent part of my childhood. It was on 50 acres and was the most beautiful spot in the world to me. Notice that the yard is fenced in to keep out livestock and wandering critters. Even the dogs were not allowed into the inner yard. The yard was filled with all kinds of flowering bushes and I especially loved the Snowball bush.

In the early morning, cows would gather around the fence and Mooooo trying to get my grandpa to come out and milk them. It was not the greatest way to wake up but maybe better than an alarm, although you couldn't shut it off. I loved the cows and the milk, cream, butter, cheese and cottage cheese they provided. I helped grandma churn milk to make butter and remember grandpa lugging around those big silver milk jugs. Happy memories!

Dashing Uncle Joe

Here's my Uncle Joe Creasy during WWII. I love the airplane with its ferocious painted teeth. A lot of the men in my family fought in wars.

A couple of my Creasy ancestors were in the Civil War and one was wounded, one killed. That's when West Virginia got its name, by the way: it seceded from Virginia, which fought for the South, and went with the North.

My dad was a naval officer during WWII, which is why I was born in Miami Beach, where he was stationed. Since the Navy was moving him around to various bases, my mom returned to WV and stayed on my grandparents farm in Nicholas County until the war was over and he came home. I was two when I saw him again. I think that was the experience of many children during that time.

Family Gathering

Hey, this is such a great picture shot about 1950 at my aunt and uncle's farm near Calvin, West Virginia. That's me in the middle of the front row leaning against my Grandma Rose's knee. On either side of me is my sister Shirley and my cousin Clark. In the back row is my mom Katie, my Grandpa John, Aunt Luella and Uncle Silmon. My dad was taking the picture.

I used to love to go to their house...just getting there was an adventure. You turned off onto this little windy  dirt road that hugged the mountains and hoped you didn't meet anyone going the other way. I was prone to car sickness so it seemed a long way to their farm but probably was only a couple of miles.

Once we got there, it was a kid's paradise, though. There were my five boy cousins and all they were into (they had a box of comic books under the bed!). I especially remember my aunt's homemade mincemeat pie with whipped cream straight from the cows. There were animals and always kittens, it seemed. And there were the mountains (need I say more?).

Look how happy we all are! I'd like to step into the picture and relive it for a couple of hours.

The Porch Swing

I just love this picture of my Grandpa on the porch swing. It is very typical of him and shows his strong, proud independence. I seldom remember him sitting down, though; he was a busy man with a 50-acre farm and 10 children and 25 grandchildren. Every time I saw him he was harvesting the garden, putting up hay, feeding livestock, shoeing horses and the like.

I also love the background of the photo: the simple, traditional use of wood in the house; the old screen door, no doubt with a hook latch; the WV vegetation crowding onto the porch from the right; the peg on the wall where Grandpa has hung his coat. The sunshine and the shadow of the photographer (who took it?). A classic.

Cemetery Visit

This is my grandma Rose and me (10 years old) in our church cemetery visiting my grandpa's grave. She has some tissue in her hand because she had been crying. She really loved my grandpa and still cried over his grave many years after he was gone. That kind of long-term marriage is almost unheard-of today and I think we've lost something.

It was always a comfort to walk in the cemetery by Alderson Church and see the headstones of my family (both Creasys and Browns). It made me feel near to relatives that were dead and gone. And often a stroll out  to the family graves after church engendered family stories, which I loved. I've always loved a story.

Country Churches

Ah, the little country churches of my childhood... This is the original Alderson church in Nicholas County, WV. My great-grandfather James Frame Brown was the first pastor, I believe. I remember my grandfather John Creasy telling me he donated timber from his land and also helped build it.

I attended this church when I was living on my grandma's farm and have fond memories of Sunday School in its basement classrooms with Koolaid and cookies for a snack. I loved the felt board easel with characters from the Bible stuck on it. And Vacation Bible School was the event of the summer. Now at home in Chicago or traveling, I'm always seeking out a humble little church like my first one.

Grandparents

I've been thinking about my grandparents this year because I became a grandmother for the first time. This is my grandma Rose and grandpa John and I loved them dearly. They look to be in their 70s here in what is obviously a somewhat formal shot (no smiles), maybe taken on a Sunday morning on the front porch of their West Virginia farm.

I remember my grandma as always smiling around me, though, as I joined in with whatever she was doing. I watched her sew on the old treadle sewing machine that you made run by pedaling with your feet. I used to watch her string beans and peel apples, always trying for that one long curl of peeling. I'd climb up beside her in the kitchen and "help" her cut open a chicken and clean out the insides before she cooked it for Sunday dinner. Sometimes I'd follow her to the chicken coop and we'd steal eggs out from under nesting chickens.

My grandpa took me with him as he worked outside. I helped stomp down the hay in a haystack and dropped potato "eyes" in rows he had plowed. He'd let me sit up on the drivers' seat of the old wagon behind the horses and sometimes would hand the reins over to me and let me "drive." Once I was pouting about something and he did some Irish step dancing to cheer me up.

My grandparents had 25 grandchildren but each one felt he or she was special in their grandparents' eyes. I hope I can follow that example with my new little granddaughter.

Quilting Bee

Here's my Grandma quilting. Goodness knows how many quilts she made over the course of her life. This one was a "wedding ring" quilt with large ring-shaped circles that intersect. I have one like it on my bed now but it's machine-made, bought in a department store.

I do own one of Grandma's handmade quilts, though, called "around the world." It starts with a square in the center and all the other squares spiral out from it like ripples in a pond. It's gotten old and thin and I no longer use it, but cherish it instead. I think of her anytime I see a quilt--needle grasped in arthritic fingers, leaning toward the light from the window.

Farm Cats

Photo is of my cat Millie, taken in West Virginia on my dad's farm near Fairmont. She was his cat but is now mine because he passed away at the age of 93 (those West Virginians can live a long time!). I promised to take her when he was gone, so now she lives with me in the suburbs of Chicago. She has adapted just fine, thank you and expended a lot of effort training me to wait on her. She used to hunt moles, birds, rabbits and mice but now is content to lie on my patio and watch the traffic jam outside my condo. And she's learned to live with my dog (more another day).

Farm cats are great and served a real function in the past, when they kept "varmits" out of the houses and barns and granaries. If you had mice, you got yourself a cat. I loved the farm cat of my childhood Whichone, who wasn't allowed in the house (cats and dogs weren't). She patrolled my grandma's farm and had a litter of kittens every spring and every fall. She got her charming name because my grandma pointed her out in a basket of kittens and the owners said in unison, "Which one?"

WV Rain

Here's a photo I dug up of my mom making apple butter (see yesterday's post). True it's an old picture but some of the gray is because it chose to rain that day and they moved to a semi-enclosed spot, so there's a lot of smoke from the fire.

It chooses to rain a lot in West Virginia. I would often wake to the sound of raindrops hitting a million leaves. I slept upstairs in the old farmhouse and the rain would pour down the tarpaper roof outside my window, rush through the gutters and thunder into the rainbarrel. It was a lovely sound and I would sigh and go back to sleep to its music.

Mom making apple butter on a rainy day

Apple Butter Time

This time of year was all about the apples on my Grandma's WV farm. They ripened in September and October, depending on the kind of apple. We had apple pie every Sunday after church in the fall and it was to die for!

But making apple butter was the big event. I wish I had the recipe because I've never tasted any apple butter quite like it. Maybe there wasn't one, though, just apples (peeled, cored and sliced) along with sugar, water and cinnamon. All of this was put in a huge cast-iron pot over an open fire in the side yard of our old farmhouse.

Grownups took turn stirring all day to keep it from sticking and burning. At the end of the day, the apple butter was put in glass canning jars and stored in the cellar. Then all winter we had a delicious spread to put on biscuits and cornbread. Yum!

Do you have a favorite recipe for apple butter? I'd love to have it.

Field of Flowers

The background here reminds me of the WV fields of my childhood in Nicholas County. We didn't really need toys in the country; we had the fields. I remember the smell, kind of weedy-sweet, of all those plants.

Milkweed was fun. In the summer, my sister and I would break off a leaf and this white milky substance would come dripping out. We were both charmed and repulsed (ewwwww). We would break open the seed pods in the fall and blow the downy seeds in all directions.

We would collect a bouquet of goldenrod, Queen Anne's Lace and chicory (we called it corn flower) and take it to Mama or Grandma. We would make daisy chains and put them on our heads or do "he loves me, he loves me not" with the petals.

We would lie on our stomachs and watch all the activity down below - ants marching around carrying stuff (sometimes another wounded ant). All kinds of colorful bugs, pretty and scary. Who needed DVDs?