Posted by Suzanne McMinn | Permalink
The new roof!
Archive for August, 2005
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Aug
31
31
The 80-year-old man (AKA my dad) is here! My dad was a tailgunner in WWII and a Church of Christ preacher for 50 years after that. You know what that means. I won’t be able to read books in church for the next month. Yes, he’s staying for a month. My mom is coming in a few weeks to join him, but she didn’t want to come until after we go to West Virginia. For some reason, she doesn’t want to go to the holler. We’ll have to fry squirrel and drink out of the still without her. On Friday, we’re going to West Virginia for a tour of the old farm where my dad grew up, the one-room schoolhouse where his mother was his teacher, and all the dead relatives in the cemetery we’ll practically kill ourselves getting to on a dirt mountain road.
We’ve made trips back to the holler before (it was a regular event when I was a child, and I’ve taken my kids a couple of times), but this might be my dad’s last chance to go. I wanted to go again now that our children are older so that they can remember the family history my dad will tell them as we drive around in the mountains to all the crumbling places where he grew up. When he says he walked five miles to school every day, it’s true, and in the hollers of West Virginia, it really is uphill both ways.
My family has lived in West Virginia for over 200 years, farming the vertical mountain land. Oil was discovered and for awhile, they “threw their underwear away” rather than washing it, they were rolling in the dough so much (now you know what the nouveau riche in the holler do with their money), then oil companies found easier places to drill than the holler. The boom ended and the once thriving “Stringtown” where my dad grew up is pretty dead now. We still have family there, and we’ll be staying in the 100-year-old farmhouse that used to be home to my great-aunt but is now kept open for relatives to bunk in when they visit the area.
Where is your family from? Are you able to go back and see the places where they lived and died now?
Behold, the new roof! Yes, in a mere week and a half ::sarcasm alert:: the “three-day” roofing job was finally completed!
