Memoirs of My Strange Upbringing in the Mountains of Appalachia, Part II

My grandfather walked into our house one night with a mad, frustrated look on his face and said to my parents, “I'm going to divorce that damn woman. I can't stand to live with her anymore!”. He was talking about my grandmother, Mae, whom he'd been married to for over fifty years. He was in his eighties so I don't know where he thought he was going to move to if he left her, but he stayed with my parents for three days before he decided there was nothing else he could do but go back home.

Mae (a fictitious name I'm using) could certainly be a very difficult person to say the least. Actually, she was just plain ornery at times. And she didn't hesitate to let people know what she thought, saying exactly what she was thinking. Being tactful was not one of Mae's skills. I think she was one of those people that you either loved or hated, nothing in between.

And apparently she and my grandfather did not have a match made in heaven because she once committed the “A” word, adultery! And she committed it with one of her husband's own brothers! Talk about close families. Some members of that family got close and then intertwined with each other. Now I'm not defending her sinfulness or anything, but I did find a poem she once wrote in an apparent time of depression and loneliness in which she sadly lamented about the lack of affection and romance in her marriage. Perhaps my backwoods, coal miner grandfather was not the ideal husband Mae thought she was getting when she married him in her tender young years. Actually, I don't think my grandfather was exactly a saint himself.

Mae had some very pretty and refined acting sisters but somehow not much of that family refinement showed up in her. I guess she was behind the door when it was passed out, so to speak. During the hot summers, she often took off her blouse and walked around the house in her bra, with her ample bosom overflowing it, while doing her housework and cooking. When I was a little girl, I once looked up at her and asked her why she was not wearing a blouse and told her I thought it looked funny. She just looked down at me and giggled and said she was cooler that way. And, you know what? She probably was! After all, they didn't have air conditioning then and probably had only one fan in the whole house, and there was no one around to see her but family anyway because they lived a mile up an isolated, Appalachian hollow and rarely got any visitors. So I guess what happened in the family stayed in the family, you might say.

But even though Mae was lacking in refined manners and social graces, she did like nice things like pretty dresses, hats, and shoes. And she and my grandfather had a rather nice house built up in that hollow, nice for the backwoods area they lived in. They had a nice outhouse, too. My grandparents had a deluxe model, a two-seater. I remember the first time I ever walked into it when I was a little girl (with my mother), I exclaimed to her, “There are two of them in here!”. That totally fascinated me. I tried to imagine which two members of the family went out there together. My little girl mind wondered about that. Maybe the extra one was so no one would have to wait outside for their turn. Ha, ha. Naturally, they kept some rolls of toilet paper in there but they also kept a Sears and Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog in there too, for backup. Can't run out of paper! You could also use the catalogs for reading material. I remember.

I've been told that one of my little girl cousins once fell on through the hole when she sat down on one of the seats. Luckily, she didn't have far to fall as she screamed and landed on soft, cushiony muck and she really wasn't hurt at all, just her pride. After my grandmother pulled her out and cleaned her up, she was just fine again. But to this day, some of the family say that it was me that fell in but I think I'd remember an experience that mortifying. Yep, it was my cousin.

Back to Mae. She liked moonshine. But it was not unusual for Appalachian families to keep a pint or two in their homes, mostly for medicinal purposes of course. Moonshine is reported to be excellent to make hot toddies with to flush pneumonia out of a person's system. They could drink a hot toddy at bedtime and often wake up the next morning lying in wet, sweat soaked sheets but feeling like a brand new person. This is what my mother's country doctor told her to do when she had “walking pneumonia”. And it worked! She woke up the next morning, completely healed. Appalachians often doctored themselves and many of their remedies worked, fortunately.

But back to Mae liking moonshine. One day our whole family was gathered together at our house for a big holiday dinner and, of course, Mae was there. By this time she was in her eighties and barely getting around. I'd better not say how she acquired it, but she had a pint of moonshine with her and when she sat down to eat she unscrewed the lid and set the jar down right beside her plate. All during dinner, some of us would sneak a peek at her taking sips and kind of snigger. But what really made it funny was that out of about twelve adults there, she was the only one drinking alcohol. Then to top it off, after she finished eating she said “Oh, I think I'm a little tipsy”! Upon hearing that, we all realized that she should not be driving herself home, so one of her grandsons drove her home in his car and another one drove her car home behind them. I'm sure to this day they laughingly remember having to help their tipsy old grandmother get home.

And home for Mae was a house where she had taken care of a lot of people. She took care of my frail, old grandfather during all those years when he was in pain and slowly dying of emphysema and black lung, and she also took care of one of her grown sons after he had a devastating stroke (his third wife up and left him after he had his stroke). After Mae's only daughter died, she finished raising her daughter's three children which could not have been easy for her (these were not any of the grandchildren she shot at). Some of her seventeen grandchildren grew up greatly loving her while the others hated her, but I'm sure they had their reasons.

Mae outlived her husband and all three of her children so I'm sure she was very lonely in her last years even with some of her grandchildren visiting her and trying to help her. She was certainly an interesting and unusual character during her lifetime, someone you either loved or hated, nothing in between. I loved her.