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Okay, it was actually quite ordinary. My parents are visiting and I let my dad stop milking Clover long enough to take us on a drive around Stringtown. He pointed out the boundaries of my great-grandfather’s farm. My great-grandfather owned hundreds of acres across the river from our farm. I’ve been here many times with my dad. It’s SO hard for me to remember everything. And the information is so fragile. My dad is one of the last of his generation. He’s 83. No one else in the family is much interested, at least not enough to come out here, to document it, to make a record. I always remember bits and pieces but not everything. This time, we tape recorded him as we drove around. This is Princess here, holding the tape recorder as we drove and my dad talked and pointed things out.
This little drive, in which we were only going within a few miles of our farm, was focused on getting down the boundaries of my great-grandfather’s farm. As well as recording him, I took photos. He also pointed out this ridge, where a small house once stood in which he was born.
More of those stories are for another trip. My parents will be here for a couple of weeks and I’ll be taking my dad out on a series of occasions to record specific places and the stories that go with them. It’s an effort that’s about more than just my own family stories. Stringtown is a town that isn’t a town anymore. My father was part of that generation that got up and left after World War II, looking for jobs, looking for adventure, looking for anything that wasn’t a backwoods holler. But he grew up here and he knows what few do–what a town that no longer exists was once like. Photographs of old Stringtown are few and far between, and it’s hard to come by anyone who lived here in its boom town heyday anymore. My dad is one of the last, and I’m determined to get as much information down as I can–where was the store, where was the ballfield, who lived here, what happened there, before it was all grown over by trees and vines and time.
After we got home, the cousins came over and we had a huge dinner with ham and fresh garden veggies and bread and shoo-fly pie on the porch!
52 is on the porch in this picture, but you can’t see him. My cousin’s son, walking on the porch, is miraculously positioned so that he blocks the view of him. I know, it’s so mean!
But look! Here’s Georgia. As I took this picture, I reminded her that she was a very popular figure on my blog. She said, as always, “I am? Why?” She cracks me up.
She was really more interested in my zucchini. Believe it or not, she was perusing MY vegetables from MY garden and she asked to take some home with her!! You think I must be making that up, don’t you? I SWEAR IT’S TRUE!!
How was your fabulous, ordinary day yesterday? Aren’t ordinary days the best?
P.S. See updates to yesterday’s post below.
