Sepia Saturday -- Salt of the Earth

Kind of timeless, this first picture.  When do you think?  1901? 1925? 1933? 

Nope - 1974. The year  after we bought the upper part of the Freeman farm in the mountains of North Carolina.

It was the farm Louise Payne Freeman grew up on. And after many years of sharecropping, she and her husband Clifford bought it from the other heirs.

Clifford and Louise grew up in a time that was almost timeless --no electricity,  no cars or trucks; they cooked and heated with wood.  No bathroom -- just a zinc tub in the kitchen on Saturday night, a 'little house' out back, and chamber pots under the beds. Raising most of your own food was the norm -- a grocery list might consist of flour, salt, baking powder, and coffee.

Louise told me that she was 'a great grown girl' before she traveled as far as the nearest little settlement -- two miles away.  As a young man, Clifford left the mountains to go to Detroit to work in the auto plants but, after tasting the city water, got back on the bus and headed home -- where he belonged.

The power pole in the second picture is a tip off that we're in more modern time.  (Clifford and Louise didn't get power till the Sixties.) Clifford is riding Nell, his slow-moving thirty-three year old mule. He's had two hip replacements and can't hardly go, he says.

Louise, a few years younger than he at sixty-nine, is a 'stout woman' and can out climb the thirty-something Florida woman taking the picture. They're heading up the mountain to salt the cows --  a weekly chore. Their cow dog Patsy  is following Louise.

My son and my nephew were thrilled to get a ride on Nell.

And my husband and I were thrilled to find ourselves adopted by these mentors. We learned how to plant potatoes, to raise a crop of tobacco, to milk a cow, churn, and make butter, We learned how to raise pigs on that extra milk and how to butcher them and put up all that good meat.  John learned how to plow with a team of mules; I learned how to wring a chicken's neck.

We learned the language of our new home -- branch for stream, chat for gravel, poke for bag --  and we learned to love and respect these folks for their wisdom and goodness.

Thirty some years later -- we are the old folks now,  passing on the lessons learned to the younger generation.  

And the stories I heard and the realities of the mountain farm have all found their places in the setting of my mystery series, just as there's a bit of Louise and Clifford in more than one of my characters.

Truly, they were the proverbial 'Salt of the Earth.'

Go HERE for other Sepia Saturday posts . . .