It's been raining, sleeting, snowing, blowing all day. Feeling my California weather wimpiness. Molly's chewing on a bone out by the wood pile, dusted with snow.
I was going to go up and take a picture of this homesteader cabin, below, but this picture from last summer will have to do. It's too COLD and there are hunters in the BUSHES!
Twenty years ago we met the couple who built this and spent their honeymoon here: Elbert Harris and his wife. Doesn't it seem hard to imagine, looking at this log cabin?
But then I remember my mother telling me about going to Raleigh to meet my father's relatives when they were first engaged. In a big old house on Hillsborough Street, maiden Cousins Minnie and Daisy told her about the end of the War, (as in Civil War) and seeing all the veterans as they returned, walking back over the hill. ..
Do you have any one step away connections to the past like that? (of course I'm older than all of you.)
Once we went to the Hastings Mesa reunion picnic, (our Colorado home is on Hastings Mesa), when some of the old homesteaders were still alive. The party time was 12 noon. When we got there at 12:15, ALL the food was gone. It was their style. I brought some food and it vanished just as fast.
7 comments:
That's wild they told you about the Civil War! Pat's ancestor was a general in it.
I eat that fast!
I don't have any good "one step away" connections to the past to share. I did descend from two brothers who fought in the civil war (one on each side, of course). After the war they lived in the same small town but never spoke to each other again.
Way too many Civil War stories for me---grandfather first name Lee (as in Robt E) and middle name Forrest (as in Nathan Bedford). No other war happened, ever, only the American Civil War.
Namowal, what town was that in?
Katy, that's so interesting about the War... I know what you're talking about. Even though I grew up in New Jersey. There's a lot more I'd like to say about this, but it's tricky territory...
Jon's great grandfather was in the Union Army and a prisoner at Andersonville.
My earliest mortal shock:
I grew up in MD, and loved visiting my grandparents in the summers in TN. Once when I was 5 or 6, I was pitching pennies with my grandfather on the back porch of his house, overlooking the TN River. Suddenly I demanded, "Are you a Yankee or a Rebel?" When he replied, "a REBEL"--and I realized that he was SERIOUS--I was deeply shocked.
(My favorite photo is of Molly in the snow, chewing on her bone.)
I asked my dad what town the civil war grudge brothers lived in. He said it was somewhere in Kentucky but he's looking up the details.
For a long time I was troubled by my father's family's opinions on racial matters. It seemed weird to me that they were so educated and so prejudiced. I mean, my father was in that Greek honor society at Duke, (forgotten the name), and both his parents were teachers. His mother was president of St. Mary's in Raleigh for many years.
Now all of that generation are gone. And like you said Katy, there was only one war. I feel more tolerant about it all now.
When I went to St. Mary's there was a black man who worked in the kitchen who remembered my father so fondly, from when he was a boy. This man was really old at the time. I'm sure, doing the math, that his parents were slaves.
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