Mountain Winters

Since writing last week’s blog, we’ve had a snow.  It fell on the Easter flowers, but of course Easter isn’t for another 5 weeks – it’s a late Easter this year.  Then, the sun came out and warmed us up into the 70’s for a couple of days and today we’re back at 45 degrees.  Whew, wintering on the mountain is a little like riding a new roller coaster – up and down and unpredictable.

We don’t just have 4 seasons, nor do we have a single winter.  I’ve counted 5 winters, and I look for you good readers to send word of even more.  Here’s what I know about:

Three winters are named for things that are blooming when the mercury heads downward.  Red Bud and Dogwood winters may be a little easier to bear because the blooming trees promise springtime is near and add a little beauty to the bleak winter landscape.  Blackberry winter offers the same promise, as well as a reminder that fruit for pies and jelly is on its way.

The Easter Squall seems destined to run afoul of every lady’s wardrobe plans.  It seems time to dress in a pretty spring dress, but you’d better plan a coordinating sweater because the chances are good you’ll be adorned with chill bumps if you don’t.

Chunk Winter will wrap the whole season up – that’s when you’ve burned up all your winter’s wood supplies and you’ll be burning chunks to get through this cold snap.

Winter is a sneaky thing, hiding for weeks at a time then popping out just when you’ve decided it’s safe to plant vegetables or pack away everything warm that you own.  I don’t know about you, but it’s taken my whole life to learn these lessons and I’m not guaranteeing I won’t again be caught cold, but I’m much more practical and hopefully a little more patient than I once was.

That doesn’t mean I’m particularly happy that I was out starting vegetable plants just a couple of days ago and now I’m huddled by the fire.

I’m curious to hear from you – do you know of any other “winters”?Do you doubt me when I name all these different seasons?Please click comment below and let me know.

Spring Fever

About this time of year, I begin to get Spring Fever.  I’m past enjoying white, fluffy snow and the swing of temperatures has me freezing when it’s in the 40’s despite weeks of teen-temps.  Perhaps most influential, the garden has been plowed. 

Those deep furrows beckon me.  Yet they are awfully muddy right now, and too cumbersome to grow more than weeds.  Everyday this week has been in the 60’s and a little voice in my head is saying, “Ain’t it a waste not to plant on these days?”  Yes!  It is a waste – a waste of most of the seeds I might plant to chill and never germinate.  If I work that soil up now, it will undoubtedly be rock-hard by July because the spring rains will beat it down… are you convinced to stay inside a little longer, and hold onto those seeds?  If so, please keep reminding me.

I sat down to talk with you about healthy foods and the health I hope to coax out of my garden this year.  But then the fever took over I suppose. So, let’s talk about early gardening.

You may remember me sharing with you a story from Callie Melton about Goin’ Sallet Hunting.  As I look at my garden spot, I am reminded of her description of the women-folk scouring the fields for spring’s first edible greens.  She says this excursion was more important than even making soap.  I can’t help but wonder if it was as much for their mental health as the family’s diet.  After the cold dark days of winter, the sunlight beckons something deep in my soul.  I think that’s why I want so badly to plant something right away. 

We’ve talked here before about how I realize that my winter days have been vastly different than those of Ms. Melton’s mother and grandmother.  Electric lights, central heating, motorized transport and well-plowed, asphalt roads mean wintertime living isn’t nearly as hard or isolated as those women endured.  Still, shorter hours of sunshine and barren trees are never as nice as summer – even when longer days and warmer temps mean bring on planting, weeding and canning. 

We like to think of the “good ole’ days” as sitting before a crackling fire, visiting with family, and eating comfort foods.  And that’s all true, until spring’s sunshine freed them to go sallet huntin’!

As soon as it’s dry enough to work up a row or two I’ll get out some gravelin’ potatoes – that’s taters that you plan to eat as soon as they are big enough, with the skins still soft.  Boiled with salt and pepper and served with fried squash and ripe tomatoes, they are a summer delicacy on the mountain.  If you’ve been peeling last fall’s shriveling spuds then you, too, are looking forward to new potatoes.

Mountain summers are milder than the valley’s but there are still some vegetables that won’t thrive in the hotter months.  Therefore, spinach, lettuce, peas, broccoli and cauliflower will need to go out as soon as we’re safe from hard freezes, or a late snow.

Oh my, the more I write, the worse the spring fever is getting… we’ll talk about mountain winters next week!

This Hydroponic lettuce bed is my modern answer to sallet huntin’

What's Up with Their Hair?

You won’t often find me writing about fashion on account of my personal fashion choices are rarely in-step with the modern era.  However, I’m thrilled to discuss the subject from an historical perspective, and that’s just the topic a friend and I recently found ourselves on when looking at an old, family photo.

In 1907 my great-great grandparents sat for a photo with 7 of their 12 children (the two eldest children had already left home and the youngest three were not yet born).  My cousin asked, “What’s up with their hair?”  Our ensuing chat left me with a few thoughts I wanted to share with you dear readers.

First of all, fashion looks very different in hindsight.  We’ve talked here before about the way I study these old photos – there is so much more in a picture than the face of an ancestor.  I know that this family was far from wealthy, but neither were they destitute.  You see the children are all nicely dressed, yet the boys are only in gallused pants and white shirts.

The two girls standing on the left of the photo are twins, Marthy and Bithy – technically the names are MarthA and TobithA, but in our mountain vernacular, those names are universally pronounced with a long “e” sound at the end.  Notice they are wearing matching plaid skirts and high necked Victorian blouses.  They are not in homespun, yet the skirts may have been from feed sacks.  Because we know that photographs were rare and valuable, the family surely dressed in their Sunday best. 

And these teenage girls undoubtedly spent time coiffing their hair in the styles they’d studied in the ladies’ magazines.  Victorian hairstyles are widely covered in blog articles so a search quickly yields portraits and publications of the era.  The styles were large and elaborate.  It was a day when women did not cut their hair, so they generally had plenty to work with.  Additionally, they added switches and rats to puff and pad wherever natural growth was considered insufficient. 

That much hair was hard to manage so women only washed it once a month – there were actually published instructions for brushing between washes.  Unlike the sets of the 1960’s and 1970’s, these styles had to be re-created every day.  Up-dos were un-done every night and all that hair was brushed or aired to promote healthy scalp and roots.  Women usually covered their hair when doing heavy duty cooking and cleaning.  A net or snood was often used to contain the hair during days at home.  These steps would help to keep the hair free of dust as well as keeping it out of the way for work.  (Just a personal note, with today’s long styles I often wonder how anybody gets any real work done.  I have to have my hair up when I’m working – although the ponytail I’m currently sporting hardly compares to these ladies!)

Note that Ova Todd (back row far right) is only 12-13 years old (depending on just what month of the year it is) at the time this photo was made, yet her hair is up just like her 14 or 15 year old sisters.  Young girls wore their hair down on their shoulders, put back in ribbons or braids.  It was a right-of-passage to get to put your hair up and I can just imagine Ova begging her mother and arguing that she really was old enough.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before but this is one of my biggest pet peeves with period movies and television:  because our styles today are lend toward hair being down, I see stars portraying Victorian-era women with their hair hanging down their back.  It seems like such an easy thing to be historically accurate in that I don’t know why Hollywood producers don’t get it right.

Perhaps the Todd girls’ high foreheads didn’t lend themselves to the feminine pompadour, but they succeeded in volume and poof.  Remember that the solemn looks are more about photographic tools than the family’s state of mind.

Checking In on Weather Predictions

Back on October 8th I wrote a little article here about the signs for winter and I thought we ought to look back and see how accurate we were.

As I write now, the ground is still white from the 7 inches of snow that fell Sunday (now 4 days ago) and it feels like 11° right now.  The actual temperature at 2:45 is showing 22°. 

We’ve had 2 significant snowfalls in the first 20 days of 2022 and as I look at the 10 day forecast, I see 7 days with lows in the teens.

We well know that the weather varies from year to year so I took a look back as some recorded data.  In January 1955 Jamestown, TN recorded just 1.78 inches for the whole month, 3.13 inches in 1958, 6.8 inches in 1963, 12.1 inches in 1970, 5.3 inches in 1982.  (1982 is the first year the National Weather Service says the data is “reliable”.)  7 inches in 1987, January 1995 had 5 inches and 2002 had 6.7 inches.  Jamestown’s record snowfall was 18 inches on February 4, 1998.  The Crossville airport’s record was on March 13, 1993 at 18 inches. 

In October, I was looking at a bumper crop of acorns and hickory nuts.  It seemed as though God had provided amply for the woodland foragers in preparation for a rough winter.  Based on the snow and temperatures so far the nuts seem to be a good predictor.

I’ll check back in on this in March, who knows, the Easter flowers may bloom next month.

Old Christmas

I trust you’ve all had a blessed Christmas!  This Christmas season seemed short to me – more so than what is normal these days as every month and season seem to pass in the blink of an eye!  I think because Christmas Day fell on a Saturday, and there were only 3 December Sundays, every church service seemed to be a special program of one type or another and… well I guess I can’t really explain why Christmas went so fast this year. 

I can definitively say that I cooked myself out.  Saturday evening I told my husband I didn’t think I’d cook again for a week – and I stuck pretty close to that declaration but I’m over it now and I’m feeding them all again.

What would you think if I told you that there is still another Christmas Day to come in this season - so keep your festive spirit alive, and the wilting Christmas tree too, I suppose.

This is Old Christmas and as I was reading about it, the independent, Appalachian spirit seemed so strong that I really wanted to share it with you!

First of all, let’s establish that there has long been speculation of exactly what day of the year Mary actually gave birth to the baby Jesus.  Now I’ve probably mentioned this a few times, but the exact date of one’s birth is much more important to us in the 21st century than it ever was in the past.  We are known not by our name, familial association or even public reputation as much as we are known by our Social Security number and our date of birth.  If you call your doctor, bank or insurance company it is rarely good enough to say, “I’m Beth Durham” because they will ask for that D.O.B.  When Jesus answered the pondering Jews’ in John 8:58, “…Before Abraham was, I am”, no one asked for his date of birth. 

Tradition says that the early church chose to turn a pagan holiday holy by celebrating the birth of the savior when the Romans celebrated the sun – sort of the sun’s birthday because they were hoping to implore longer days and more sunlight.  And that’s how we settled on December 25th.  I’ve always said, if you want to bake me a cake and bring presents, we can call any ole’ day my birthday and if we celebrate Jesus’ birth in the right spirit, He is surely pleased with it.

LearnReligions.com says the first Christmas celebration was in 336, then some 1200 years later Pope Gregory XIII saw fit to change up the calendar, replacing the old Julian calendar by removing 11 days.  (The Pope thought the Julian calendar was causing Easter to move too far from the Spring Equinox and he wanted to correct that.)  Now, in 1582 the only Appalachians were native and never heard of Pope Gregory or the Catholic church.

It would be nearly 200 years before England embraced the new calendar and by that time the American colonies were well established and the Scots-Irish had begun to settle Appalachia.  Here’s where you really see that independent spirit – as well as the isolation of the mountaineer.  For many years, the people of the mountains continued to use the old Julian calendar.  That meant that their Christmas celebration was held when the Pope’s calendar read January 6th. 

This makes January 6th Old Christmas Day.

Next Thursday I may have gotten a second wind for festivities and maybe we’ll just celebrate again… what do you think of that idea?