'Possum Patch: Family History

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Family History

Well, it's almost Thanksgiving and our thoughts turn to a day of cooking or a day of eating, whichever end of the stick you're on, but either way it's nice.

Also we might pause and adjust our thinking a little bit about that original old American holiday and the people responsible for it. If you believed everything they taught in school, that totally Godly, warmly dressed, well tooled and well armed men and women stepped off the boat, bid fond farewell to the captain and immediately joined a feast of turkey, venison, succotash, (that's a corn thing,) and pumpkin pie all over the place, Not So!

Starvation, disease and ignorance killed far more than were ever saved by pumpkin pie and family prayer. I just want you to know that our family was well represented during those hard times and the following centuries before we were finally liberated by the invention of frozen pizza and instant hair remover.

So lest we forget:
Our grandparents were Lewises, Lambs, Allans and an unknown. These predecessors had been infiltrated by the Bakers, Shaws, McDonalds/McDaniels and Wiskersons/Wiskerchen/Whiskersons.

Our first Lewis's got off the boat in 1628. This trip included a sixteen year old young lady by the name of Mary Lewis but she was so obstreperous she was threatened with a dunking. Yes, they actually dunked people, mostly women who did not act godly or talked too much or criticized someone's stupidity, and they had Mary's tank ready. But in her defense, her old Dad, Tom Lewis, had been co-owner of a thriving tavern in London Town and what sixteen year old wants to leave a party place like that for a bunch of dancing savages and pickled succotash ?

But in a document still readable in the Winthrop papers,a kindly and godly older gentleman was moved by her, (how so moved we can only guess) and petitioned Governor Winthrop for her hand in marriage, notwithstanding the age difference , in order to save her from perdition and subsequent lawful punishments.

Permission was granted for her release and marriage to the gentleman. He spent the next several years in the new world's courts trying to protect her from a multitude of defamatory charges against her "character and reputation", one of which was inspired by a gentleman who stated publicly that she "lifted her skirts" for him on several occasions. This particular defamation charge was thrown out of court because the judge said, "there can be no defamation if all statements are true and fact." Well, what can a girl do? Ultimately the nice gentleman gave up and took his girl back to merry old England where heaven only knows what trouble she got into.

So begins our family saga in the new world.

And for all you unbelievers out there..these transactions are documented in 17th century court records, the Winthrop Papers and a wonderful historical publication:,

Appendixes of the Real Founders of New England, Appendix A page 155

1 comment:

A WORK IN PROGRESSNovember 1, 2009 at 3:19 PM
I am so gladd you posted this one!! I love it, we are such head strong women in this family!
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A Bedtime Story for Chickens

Once upon a time there was a little red hen. Each morning she woke early and left the special chicken house and worked hard scratching all day and laid very nice eggs in the special nest in the special house for chickens. But she had one bad habit. She did not like to go to bed at Chicken Bedtime with the other chickens. One morning she did not wake early. She did not wake at all. Fluffy red feathers blew in the breeze beneath the apple tree where the racoon liked to perch at night.

The Moral of the Story is: Go to bed when you're supposed to.

Memoirs

These are my memories and even though others have their own, perhaps contradictory, memories these are mine.

Memoirs Chapter 1

Our House

Unlike many people, I spent my childhood in the same house in which I was born. My childhood was encompassed by the sameness of each room, the never-changing porches, ragged lawns and roughly wooded acres and the multiplicity of a neighborhood comprised of families with names that told the history of the Midwest without even trying.

As an adult I’ve been fascinated by those old names: West, Woods, Rogers, Yates, Mathews, Alexander, Shields, Faucett and of course ours, descendents of the Lewis’s, Allens, Bakers and McDonalds, all reaching back to the English and Scots Irish Kentucky and Tennessee immigrations of the very early 1800s.

The other names were newer, German or Irish and with German and Irish mores: Rittermeir, Rintschler, Stock, (Dad’s name), Ostertag, McGosker, Kirkpatrick, O’Dell, Coopersmith, Mylars.

Many of these German and Irish families, fleeing hunger and conscription, lured by land and wages, came a decade or two later in the 19^th century during and shortly after the building of the railroads and stayed to build the Midwest after the end of the Civil War.

Dad built most of our house. I understand it was just two small rooms sitting on a brushy five acre lot at the edge of a dirt road when Dad, Mom and my six older siblings moved in. He later bought an adjacent forty acres.

He dug a basement, added two upstairs rooms and two downstairs rooms and a porch at the back. The path from the back porch wound down past the walnut tree and through the tall weeds to the out house. A very large family of spiders owned one whole corner of the outhouse so I never sat on that side.

Dad had a lot of help from friends that worked with him as laborers at different building sites that evidently had a lot of “left overs.” His friends were generous fellows and made steady contributions from those sites in the form of left over buckets of nails, left over gravel, left over lumber and so forth. The day the guy came with the concrete truck with the left over concrete for the basement floor was a banner day. Thank heavens for left overs because we really needed the room.

I can just barely remember a pot bellied stove into which went old newspapers, little sticks of wood and sometimes bigger chunks of wood or a scuttle of coal. Dad’s big heavy coffee pot sat on the stove top and the smell of the coffee mixed with the smell of the burning wood and the steam from the coffee made the rooms seem a lot warmer than they were.

Before long the house was modernized even further and a monstrous coal stove taller than either of my parents lurked just under the basement

stairs. Heat rose into the house through a large grate in the living room.

A few steps away from the furnace was the coal bin accessed through a low basement window that opened onto the driveway. The coal truck would be backed down the drive and the driver, usually a black man, would shovel the coal by hand through the window.

Many people say that they can’t remember anything before they were four or five years old and I don’t know why. I remember a great deal before that. They say people remember intense experiences and that is probably true.

My first actual memory was of standing, crying in my crib, gripping the top rails, dressed in a little white flannel gown that tied at the back of the neck, and being very scared. It was bedtime and my crib was in my parents’ room. Mother came to me and lay me down and pinned the blanket to the bottom sheet on each side of me so I would not get uncovered in the night and told me, “Shhh”.

Soon after that my bed was moved into what later became the bathroom. It was a tiny room that opened off of my parents’ room with just enough room for my crib to fit along one wall. This was the room in which I slept during the Chicken Wars.

We had no well and water was saved from rain or hauled in I guess but stored in the cistern near the back porch. It had a large square concrete top with a smaller concrete square that could be moved to check the level of the water and to remove anything unsavory. Two cinder blocks placed on this cap kept it in place.

Frogs and toads lived in the inside rim of the cistern and Daddy said they never hurt anything but the snake he found once had to be removed. He did not like snakes.

During the Chicken Wars of my infancy me and my brother, just a couple of years older than I, would run to the concrete of the cistern top to evade the old Banty rooster. The rooster was very protective of his hens but the hens always came to people expecting to be fed. It was a no-win situation for us.

Even though we were forbidden to hurt the old rooster my brother always fought back hard, throwing dirt clods and sticks and even once throwing a pan of water on him that had been set out for the dog but we always lost and wound up high tailing it for the cistern top.

There we would wait until either someone came to rescue us or the old rooster forgot we were there and wandered off.

My nightmares at that time always involved that wretched rooster and the safety of the cistern.

My worst rooster nightmare was probably my last as it occurred during one of my parents’ weekly Pinochle game and I was taken up to sit on Mom’s lap and be made over by Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank and the Mylars from next door who had been fortunate or smart enough to leave their kids at home.

And Daddy took noisy little sips of coffee from his saucer and clicked his false teeth at me, making the bottom ones slide almost out and it was always the best of jokes although Mom found the saucer sipping thing and the clicking teeth disgusting.

On Saturday nights we, that is the family, went to Nelsons Tavern where Mom and Dad and sometimes my older siblings and their friends would dance to the juke box and Dad would drink how ever much beer he could afford, generally one or two, and Mom would drink Coca Cola out of cool green bottles, slowly so it would last.

Mostly they danced with each other but occasionally a careful ritual would transpire. During a lull when they were not dancing, someone might come to our table and ask Dad if it was alright if he asked his wife to dance and Dad would always say they could and they would ask Mom to dance and she would leave her Coca Cola to dance. She particularly loved the Polka and the Schottische.

Although both Dad and Mom loved music and loved to dance, they did not dance well together. Mother, a very reserved person, danced rather stiffly and with considerable rigidity. Watching them was a little like watching a happy bee cavorting around an upright zinnia blossom. The bee is busy but the zinnia never quite participates.

Daddy said she danced like she had a poker up her butt but I don’t think he ever said it to her face.

And sometimes Dad would turn to Mom and ask if she cared if he danced with so and so and Mom would say no, she didn’t care and Dad would do the ritual. He would go to the table of the lady with whom he wished to dance and he would ask her husband if he would mind if he asked his wife to dance. Dad would turn to the lady and ask her if she would like to dance and off they would go.

A request was seldom refused within reason. But the ritual was always observed. No man approached another person’s wife without that permission. It made for the most orderly and friendly of situations wherein everybody could have a great time and the risk of misunderstandings was minimal.

Up to the time I got bored with party life and was considered old enough to be left at home with the bigger kids, I had lots of partners myself. Johnny Spoons, known for keeping time to the juke box by rapping out the beat with two spoons held between a thumb and two fingers, often partnered me to the poignant strains of Good Night Irene or Sentimental Journey but we both liked the polkas better. Even though he was very old and because of an injury, unable to keep up with polka steps, he seemed to enjoy it.

Shorty, however, was my favorite partner, partly because he wasn’t much taller than I was as a four year old. Shorty wasn’t really short but he too had been injured and was unable to stand erect. This meant we could pretty much look each other in the eye and Shorty’s eyes were always merry and happy.

Sometimes he would stand me up on the bar and everyone would clap and holler and I would do my four-year-old version of the hootchy cootchy to the music of the Sabre Dance and be rewarded with a bag of chips and an orange Nehi soda.

But I tired of the party life. I didn’t like sleeping on a pile of coats on a hard table and was finally allowed to stay home. I’m the only person I know who gave up the bar scene at such a tender age.

##############

Memoirs Chapter 2:

A Different Kind of Mother

Our mother was not like other mothers. She was hard to love and harder to like. Independent and unbending, she had few friends and regarded most of the world, including her children, who mostly reciprocated her lack of natural affection, as unworthy of her interest.

She was meticulous about her person and of a late evening, winter and summer, in those days before indoor plumbing, we were all ordered to bed and she began her bath.

The night I, having slipped quietly downstairs on some forgotten errand, saw Mother at her bath changed her forever for me.

Pale and naked in the moonlight from the window above the sink and its small pan of hot water, her body gleamed like the inside of a sea shell, cool and incandescent. The flesh of her breasts, flattened by the needs of seven infants, was only a shadow against her upper body and the smooth roundness of her abdomen shone starkly white in the silverness of the window’s moonlight.

The scent of her bath soap and the vinegar she used to rinse her once-red hair filled the room.

Her very luminescence, in the dark kitchen of our home that night, seemed out of place and time,..a visitor from some powerful other world that valued more a stricter code..a cooler hand and heart..that did not belong here with us and certainly not to us. The hot winds and dry suns of the Midwest were anathema to such a one.

Before me was a person meant for harsh and vicious winters and the pale meagerly glint of a Celtic summer. Such a one required friends more fast and foes more ferocious than the weak genetic pool she was stuck with.

Of course I could not come anywhere near verbalizing these thoughts at the time, even to myself, but the experience was a powerful one and it stayed with me to be pondered upon and sorted out as facts came later, drifting into my life as our lives unfolded.

'Possum Patch

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Family History

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