I have been asked to do a MeMe and here goes.....you won't believe it but here it is anyway.
I was born on a hard scrabble, self-sufficient farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mts. of Virginia in Nelson County. My farm boy father was a WWII GI and my mother was a German war bride who barely survived the war in Berlin. I was (am) the oldest of 5 kids with a brother born by the time I was 2 and a sister born on my third birthday.
We had no electricity, no plumbing, no running water, and never any money. Everything we needed we either grew and preserved it, hunted it down and killed it or raised it. I ate a lot of things in the woods just to see what it tasted like and I knew wild food enough to survive. We bartered for the rest. ( Sugar, flour and salt.) I milked cows when I was three, shucked dried corn off the cob to feed chickens, hauled in firewood for the cook stove and wood heater. I also mucked stalls, fed hay to the cows and slopped hogs. I hung diapers out on the clothesline and my fingers stuck to the frozen clothes line in the winter and I had to peel them off the frozen wire. My mother had to do the diapers by hand but I had to hang them up to dry. Daddy was a carpenter and got work ,when and where, he could.
My Bible-thumping Grandfather got up a 4 am to milk the cows and I was right there with him as he carried the milk bucket, and a lantern, and quoted scripture. As he quoted scripture I asked questions and argued with him. He said I was being ‘blasphemous' and I must not question God, but I did anyway. My Grandmother would have breakfast ready on the woodstove when we came in from milking. Before we ate we passed the Bible around the table and everyone had to read a passage (by light from a coal oil lantern) from a selected scripture. After breakfast the work day began, yeast rolls made, chickens plucked, beans snapped, apples peeled, you name it, depending where we were in the seasons. At day's end, after supper, we read the Bible by lamp light again. Though I didn't know it we were pioneers.
We always had loaded guns behind the door and we were trained how to use them AND we knew what "kill" meant. I was always admonished not to run into a bear, a bobcat, ‘get up on' a copperhead,( I once saw my father shoot the head off a snake crawling up his leg) go too near the railroad tracks( I loved walking the trestles) and not to get out of "hollerin' distance." Hollerin' (yodeling) was the only way to communicate between relatives in the hills and if there was a need that is how we got ‘hold of one another,' in case of a fire or an accident. For about 15 miles around we were all related.
Then came that awful day they said I had to go to school. Why? I was mad, sad and definitely not glad so when the bus came, a mile from the house no less, I hid and told everybody the bus didn't come. I got a whippin' and the next day I was told to get on the bus or don't come home. I just wondered whose home was the closest to go to if I couldn't come back MY home. School was a hard slog and I was in trouble all the time. If you have ever seen a ferile cat and tried to pick it up, that was me in school.
In '59 we moved to Charlottesville because my mother thought we needed an ‘education.' Our first flush toilet and we could't stop flushing it and laughing. I still got into trouble at school for fighting. I didn't want to be there and if anybody looked at me crooked, I'd be in a fight and boys were a favorite target. My father couldn't take living in town so we moved to Albemarle County.
After that I graduated high school, got married and had a son. All this during Vietnam at it worst. My brother quit high school and went to Nam. Like me, he thought anything was better than school. My husband, Ronny, was a physics grad of the University of Va. It was his bright idea that I get educated and begin classes in college. When my son was 4 I began college full time. In the meantime my husband got MS, but we didn't know what it was at the time. I graduated from Uva in business and was in the first class of women to be admitted to the all male school in an area other than nursing or education.
I was hired, early on, by Xerox. Carter was President, we had a little money and I bought my first car. After 5 years at Xerox I was hired by one of the customers, GE. If I thought school was bad, the corporate life was torture. They labeled me an IC (individual contributer) and NOT a team player. My husband was getting more and more limited, I was taking classes( while working full-time) toward my MBA at James Madison University (an hour away) at night as my son was becoming a teenager. In ‘84 I left the corporate life and never looked back.
Now I am a Stager!
I've been rich and I've been poor and don't see much difference except when you're rich you have more money. The sunsets and sunrises are just as stunning, the streams are just a bubbly, people are just as wonderful, butterflies still flutter, birds still sing and there still ain't nothing like a home grown tomatoe.
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