Hero

John Lee Hooker, Asheville, NC, 1985

John Lee Hooker, b. August 22, 1917, d. June 21, 2001, was born the son of a sharecropper in Coahoma County, Mississippi.  He was an influential American blues musician, singer, and songwriter who developed a unique style of country blues that he called the “talkin’ blues” that was considered his trademark. Two of Hooker’s songs, Boogie Chillen and Boom Boom, are on the list of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 songs that shaped rock and roll with Boogie Chillen being named one of the Songs of the Century. Hooker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is a member of the blues and rock and roll halls of fame.

In 1985, George Bostic and his wife Connie, a noted Asheville artist, operated the Asheville Music Hall on Wall Street in downtown Asheville. It was one of the first music venues to open in the newly renovated city. As the blues scene has picked up in recent weeks in downtown Marshall, I was reminded of this concert years ago by one of the genre's great artists and this photograph I made of him in mid-performance. 

A Day Like Today

 To go outside on a day like today is to know insignificance. 

It has to do with the wind, its domination of the landscape.

Coming down the mountain above my studio,

a steady blow with long gusts and a stinging drizzle.

Trees, big trees, swaying back and forth, back and forth.

It will change to snow tonight, the color of the sky tells it.

 

It’s a cleansing wind.

Finishing off the work of winter,

the hard freezes and leafless limbs.

Out with the old and stale.

New dead limbs in the woods and on the road.

Best carry the chainsaw in the truck for a couple of days.

 

With only a vague promise of bright and fresh.

Peaks of blue in a sky washing gray.

A flush of daffodil blooms last week

brought spring to people’s hearts and minds.

Today they’re beat back.

Limp and broken in the cold and wind.

 

 

Mom and Dad on Their Wedding Day

 February 25, 1945, My parents - Robert Warren Amberg, Catherine Galeano Amberg,

with Anthony Vitto and Mary Mastromarino Galante. 

Today, had they lived, would have been my parent’s 68th wedding anniversary. As it was, my father died in February 2002 as they were approaching their 57th anniversary and my mother passed away in 2008.

My parents married in a bit of a rush. Mom had been dating Ralph for a couple of years – a career Army officer – and my father was Ralph’s best friend. When Ralph broke off the relationship, my father stepped into the void and he and my mother were married within two weeks of their first date. Part of the rush had to do with World War II, which was coming to a conclusion in Europe, and after a couple of weeks of marital bliss Dad was shipped off to Italy where he stayed until the end of the war.

But part of the rush to marriage also had to do with my mother’s sense of rebellion. She was a first generation American of Italian and Sicilian ancestry who was clearly ready to move away from that old world way of living. My grandparents, however, were not quite ready to let go of her or their traditions and my grandfather, especially, was so displeased with the marriage that he didn’t attend the wedding. It wasn’t just that my father wasn’t Italian, let alone not Sicilian, but nobody knew anything about him, his family, or his prospects. My mother’s two young Italian cousins –whose families were also from Gioia de Colle in Puglia, Italy - stood with them at the wedding as symbols of friendship and love, but also as kind of sanctioning agents who recognized and accepted that the old world was changing. The marriage was a leap of faith for my father as well. He was a mid-westerner, a meat and potatoes guy, a quiet man steeped in good manners and efficient organization, who was marrying into a large, loud, and emotional Italian family that loved to gamble, drink, eat, and party. 

 Mom and Dad, Ormond Beach, Florida, 1978. 

By 1978, at the time of the bottom picture, my parents had four children, one grandchild, a house in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and thirty-three years of marriage behind them. By that time, as is the case with most relationships, the romance and the rebellion had worn off and they were faced with not only the good things they had built together, but also their differences in temperament, belief, and culture. My father had taken early retirement from his government job and was ready to move to Florida where they had bought a lot in a subdivision. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that my mother would never leave her family or the place she had always known as home.

They stayed together until the end and I, for one, often wondered why. But my parents were of the generation that stayed together and honored their commitments, no matter the differences that arose later in life. It’s a lesson many of us could well learn from.

I've Got The Zuma Blues

Imagine my surprise at walking into Zuma, our local coffee shop in downtown Marshall, and finding a middle-aged black guy playing electric guitar and singing Chicago Blues. But there he was, Al “Coffee” McDaniel, and not only was he singing and playing the Blues, but he was doing it really, really well. The man has got the gift.

This latest addition to the Madison County music scene is to be a regular Monday night affair at Zuma and yet another feather in owner Joel Friedman’s cap. Friedman has been hosting the very popular Thursday night Bluegrass jam with the legendary fiddler, Bobby Hicks, for the last few years, but Blues Jam represents a significant departure from Madison County’s musical norm.

 

As most of us who live here, and many people who don’t, understand, Madison County is steeped in musical tradition – balladry, old-time, country, and bluegrass – and is considered a “source” community by music scholars for those genres. Recently though, with the arrival of hundreds of new people to the community including numerous first class musicians from other musical genres, our melodious parameters have been expanding. One of those musicians is the noted, and widely respected jazz keyboardist Steve Davidowski who is the mover and shaker behind the Monday Blues Jam. Davidowski is known in music circles as an early member of the Dixie Dregs, a jazz, southern rock, bluegrass, and classical fusion band based in Athens, Georgia. Since moving to Marshall, he has graced the town with his impromptu piano playing, walks around town with piccolo in hand, and his wonderful yearly benefit concerts for Neighbors in Need. This past Monday, in addition to McDaniel, he was joined by John Herman on bass, James Wilson on drums, and John Hupertz on harmonica. Local singing sensation, Ashley Heath, also sat in and did a full throttle version of Stormy Monday. With this new sound in town, Marshall residents can be assured that Mondays will not be stormy, and Tuesdays won’t be bad either.

Top, Blues Jam at Zuma Coffee with, from left James Wilson, John Herman, Steve Davidowski, and Al McDaniel.

Middle, Ashley Heath singing Stormy Monday with McDaniel, Steve Davidowski on sax, John Hupertz on harp.

Bottom, James Wilson on drums, John Herman on bass.

Peacham

 

I arrived at my shoot the day before the assignment. I was in Marshfield, Vermont, close to St. Johnsbury in the Northeast Kingdom, and not far from the Canadian border. It was cold for the middle of October, even up there, and spitting snow. After settling into my motel, I drove to the town of Peacham, a place I had visited fifteen years earlier, looking for Vermont cheddar and maple syrup. In a store I noticed a poster announcing a town hall meeting that night with Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s Independent US Senator.

I follow politics pretty closely and I’ve concluded, like a lot of people it seems, that Congress is malfunctioning, not representing the people its supposed to serve, and only a pawn of big business. That said, I’ve always liked Bernie Sanders and thought this would be my only opportunity to hear him speak in person. So, I went to the meeting and wasn’t disappointed.

Sanders describes himself as a Democratic Socialist, a label that scares many people. But in reality, what that label means is he is more interested in the lives of his constituents, the common people, than he is in big business or moneyed interests. He consistently votes for environmental protection, workers rights, universal health care, and media reform. One of my favorite things about him is he was a carpenter for a time before he got into politics. He was also the President of the University of Vermont.

At the town hall meeting, Sanders had chosen to spend his campaign dollars on food and provided a great, homey meal for everyone that showed up. While standing in line for grub, I met two women who both had sons that graduated from Warren Wilson College. For me, that was a sign I had come to the right place. The food was great and Senator Sander’s talk was the populist diatribe I was hoping for. I brought a yard sign home to the farm, knowing full well I couldn't vote for him, but hoping it would be a reminder of values I believe in.

Portrait of Liz Franklin

I made this photograph in 1975, less than two years after my arrival in Madison County. I had gone with Dellie, and her sister Berzilla, to visit an old friend of Berzilla’s named Ernie Franklin who lived in the small community of Chapel Hill in the county. She knew him from the older days, when her husband Lee was alive and they would regularly make music in the community. Ernie played fiddle and banjo and also made instruments and tools. She didn’t know where he lived exactly, but they figured we’d find him.

After some asking around and missed turns, we turning onto a dirt track, passed a broad empty pasture, and into a hollar with nice southern exposure. Soon, we came to a small cluster of buildings – a house with a thin smoke coming from a stone chimney, the remains of the old house with wood shingles, now used for storage, and I think a small barn. 

 

A small, wiry man came out of the house. Ernie Franklin. After he and Berzilla got re-acquainted, he invited us in to meet his mother who also lived there. With winter approaching, Liz Franklin was soon going to live with her daughter in Asheville, and once inside the house, you realized how tough it would be for an older, frail, person. There was no indoor plumbing. An outhouse. Heat came from a fireplace and coal stove set in the middle of a small room. No electricity – light came from oil lamps.  This was how she was raised and lived most of her life, and you could sense she didn't want to leave. Years of hard work showed in her face and hands, but she clearly wouldn’t last through a hard season.

I haven’t shown or exhibited this photograph very much over the years. Initially, I loved it. It seemed to embody a romantic notion of place and people for me - tough, resilient, wizened, looking to the light, and seeing a past. But with more time in the community, I began to understand those heroic characteristics were largely coming from me and less so the people themselves. People like Dellie, who had lived hard lives, knew there was little of the romantic about it. So, I put the photograph away and published another from the same visit in my book.

 

But I’ve re-visited the first photograph in recent months, initially as part of digitizing my negative files, and then because I realized I still love the portrait. Thirty-eight years after the image was made, I can look at her face and see an idealized, noble rendering that fits neatly into a specific stereotype of place. But now, I can also see that her look is true.    

Van Griffin

 

Van Griffin at the Rodeo, Marshall, Madison County, NC, 2012

Van Griffin died last night.

I didn’t know Van all that well, but what I knew of him I liked.  I met him a few years ago through his son, Toby, and would run into him with frequency in downtown Marshall, or on the Bypass, and always at the rodeo and county fair. He was forever  ready to talk and was always generous with me – never refusing a request to make his photograph.

Van was a common man; and I say that in the most complimentary of ways. Easy to be around, no pretensions, funny, fun-loving. Here in the mountains, people would say he was a good ol’ boy. He kept chickens, lots of chickens, and regularly won prizes for them at the county and regional fairs.

This morning as I write this, I know Van is at peace after a long illness. I think of his family – his wife Ruth, his children – Toby, Keith, and Jan, his grandchildren – Levi, Jordan, Savannah, and Kaitlin, his brother Coy and his sister Jacksie. Death is always hardest for those left behind, but I know we will carry memories of this kind, graceful man with us for a long time and those memories will cause us to smile.

Absent # 2

Having a black bear rubbing against your chest is a hard act to follow, but after leaving Ben and Debbie Kilham, I drove on to western Massachusetts to meet with John Freeman and his sister Jane. They lived on an amazing piece of land, dotted and marked with artifacts and burial grounds from native and settler times. They took me to the original boundary marker that deeded their land to a distant ancestor from Native Americans in the late 16th century. Like many ancestral and historical forests, the Freeman’s land is surrounded by development and they’re under increasing pressure to sell the property because of high land values and corresponding high taxes. I don’t like the word “magical” so much, thinking it overused and easy. But I did, in fact, spend a magical day walking with them and their friends, Archie and Dave, through a primordial landscape in the misting rain.

 

Top, John and Jane Freeman. Bottom, left, Native Donation Pile, right, John and Jane Freeman with Dave Beyor and Harrison Achilles.


I arrived home to an email from Apple notifying me of a potential hard drive crash and a need to immediately replace it. This is always disconcerting news if, as most photographers in the modern world do, you store your files digitally. That hard drive represents years of work. Thank you for back up – one of technology’s blessings. But my assistant, Jamie Paul, and I also faced production of a large number of prints for an exhibition at the Jameson Gallery at Duke at the end of November. The exhibit, titled Madison County Stories, presented new views of mountain life from myself, Duke University students, and Madison Middle School girls. The students had all participated in the Spring Creek Literacy Project; a summer program with the Duke students acting as mentors to the middle-schoolers in storytelling, writing, and photography. It was a big exhibit – 43 of my prints and 146 student pieces – and while my work was finished and ready to hang, the student work was still in the editing phase and had to be printed and put behind glass. But despite the loss of a week due to the computer repair, and some timely help from Kyndall and MaryRose, we got it finished and down to Durham on the Monday after Thanksgiving. It took us three and a half days to hang it, and the process was not without it’s own drama and intricate mathematical equations. The show looked wonderful and the opening was a big success and well attended. My friends Debbie Chandler and Denise O’Sullivan, who are Dellie’s grandchildren and noted ballad singers in their own right, sang and pretty much stole the show.

 

Kelsey, Paw Paw Creek, Madison County, NC, 2012, from Madison County Stories.

                              Top, Denise Norton O'Sullivan Singing in the Barn, Sodom Laurel, Madison County, NC, 1976, from SodomSong.

 Bottom, Debbie Norton Chandler Dancing at the Eno River Festival, Durham, NC, 1976, from SodomSong.

 

I can’t say enough good things about Jamie Paul. In addition to the great work he's been doing with me for the last eighteen months, he's also found time to produce a CD of his music, Let It Mend, which will be available for purchase beginning February 5th at jamiepaulmusic.com.

 

We decided on a quick turnaround and moved the show to Marshall for a January 18 opening reception at the Madison County Arts Council. Here, the exhibit presented different hanging challenges, and more limited space. Most importantly though, it offered the opportunity to present the work in the place it was created with the individual “artists” and their families in attendance. The reception was packed - teachers and administrators from the school system, politicians, and other members of the community, many of whom were in the photographs. It became more Homecoming than Art Exhibit, highlighted by the student's pride in seeing their work on the gallery walls.

Top, left, Kristina Dixon, right, Cassidy Belcher. Bottom, left, Brittany Norton, right, Makalah Creaseman.

All students are from Madison County Middle School.

It’s good to have work. Assignments, lectures, exhibits, and grants pay bills and provide time to work on personal projects. I’m very fortunate to get to do what I do and I’m grateful for it. Additionally, my work often takes me out to the wider world, to places and with people I would not normally have the chance to see or meet. Throughout my career, photography has provided open windows to diverse, beautiful, inspiring places. I love that that is the case. These trips help me understand that people everywhere are much the same – kind, generous, and helpful – while also possessing strong differences of opinion, speech, and manner. We live on a wildly diverse planet in a wildly tumultuous time. It would seem that flexibility, tolerance, and an ability to adapt will play increasingly important roles in our lives.

Absent # 1

I have been mostly absent from this site since the end of October and I apologize for my longer-than-anticipated leave. Jamie, the young man who works with me, has counseled me about the pitfalls of electronic media. Rule # 1 is not to be absent from your site for very long because people will forget about it, and you. I’ve broken this first, elemental rule.

But in my own defense, it’s been a busy, hectic stretch of time. It began in mid-September with a weeklong trip to Kentucky and Mississippi for the American Forest Foundation. In three different locations, I photographed landowners who participate in the American Tree Farm System, picturing their involvement with their land and forests. Near Bardstown, Kentucky, I spent the day with two Trappist monks, Brothers Conrad and Bartholomew, at the Abbey of Gethsemani. We spoke at length of faith and forests as we walked and rode through the 2,600-acre tree farm they share with other resident monks. At one time over 270 monks lived at the monastery and it operated as a farm, producing most of what the monks consumed, as well as, world-famous fruitcake and cheeses. With fewer than 50 monks now, the farm mostly produces trees, which are managed for production and retreat. The Abbey was home to the Catholic scholar and writer, Thomas Merton, who I know from my Catholic youth. It was an honor to see his home and the spot that inspired much of his writing.

 Top, The wall of Thomas Merton's House. Bottom, left, Brother Conrad, right, Brother Bartholomew. 

That six-day trip was followed soon thereafter by a presentation at Wake Forest University. My talk and accompanying exhibition in the University Library was part of a larger event surrounding the screening of the film, Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County. The film, by Kim Dryden and Joe Cornelius, looks at the evolution of a cappella ballad singing, for which Madison County is a source community. Sheila Kay Adams, the county’s gifted balladeer, storyteller, and writer, is the protagonist in the film and an old friend. I came to the project through my early (ca. 1970s) photographs of singers and musicians in the Sodom community of Madison County, some of which are used in the film, and my continued documentation of the county’s lifestyle and changes, including images of music and the arts.

 Sheila Kay Adams, Sodom, Madison County, NC, 1975, from SodomSong.

From Winston-Salem, I continued on to Duke University and a series of classes, workshops, and lectures as part of my role as a Visiting Artist for the current school year. One of the lectures was at Perkins Library in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Library has a significant archive of documentary photography and will eventually house my archive. It’s a perfect venue – small (seats 75,) intimate, couches and comfortable chairs, and good sound – and it was full with a nice mix of students, faculty, and staff. My talk was titled, Bloody Madison, ShatterZone, and the Jewel of the Blue Ridge, and looked at the demographic, cultural, and environmental evolution of Madison County.

 

 Greg Mosser Singing at Jamie Paul's Birthday Party, Marshall, Madison County, NC, 2010, from ShatterZone.

I returned home for about eight days and then left on a ten-day trip for the Forest Foundation. This trek took me to the northeast and work with another group of tree farmers. My first stop was with Mike and Vivien Fritz who live just west of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on a beautiful piece of land they’ve groomed with twenty-five miles of cross country ski and snowshoe trails that are open to their entire community for use.

From the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, I drove through the White Mountains in New Hampshire that boast Mt. Washington, second only to North Carolina’s Mt. Mitchell as the tallest peak east of the Mississippi River, and onto the North Family Farm in Canterbury, New Hampshire. Tim Meeh and Jill McCullough’s place had been part of the original Canterbury Shaker Village that dated back to 1792 and the landscape remained rich with the Shaker’s presence – stone walls and boundary markers, mill traces. Tim’s father bought the place in 1950 and it has been a family farm since then. Tim and Jill make syrup from 2,000 tapped maples, sell hay and firewood, and operate completely by wind and solar power. I stayed in their basement apartment for two nights and we found much in common from our present lives, as well as, a shared past from the late sixties and early seventies. It is so nice to be on the road and wind up in a place where you immediately feel at home.

 

Top, Tim Meeh & Jill McCullough. Bottom left, Replacing sap lines, right, their barn.

From the Shaker Village, I drove across New Hampshire, which isn’t very far, to visit with Ben and Debbie Kilham on their Tree Farm near Lyme. The Kilham’s also make maple syrup, and operate a small saw mill, but Ben is mosly noted for his work with orphaned black bear cubs. He is the state’s certified bear rehabilitator and often has as many as twenty bear cubs roaming in a fenced eight-acre lot behind his house. This stop featured my first, and probably last, opportunity to have a 100-pound cub rubbing its back against my chest. Ben is doing amazing work with orphaned cubs, all of which are released into the wild, and his long-term studies of black bear behavior have broken new ground in our understanding of these incredible creatures that, as Ben’s research has discovered, share more traits with humans than one might imagine. 

 

 Top, Ben & Debbie Kilham, Middle, left, Discovering a bear den while in the woods marking trees, right, Ben and his sister, Phoebe, walking to the food plot, Bottom, Ben feeding his cubs.

http://www.forestfoundation.org/

www.monks.org/

northfamilyfarm.com/

http://www.robamberg.com/galleries/sodomsong/

Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County

http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/

http://www.benkilham.com/Benkilham.com/HOME_PAGE.html

http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/

This post will be followed in a couple of days by "Absent #2."

A Hero

 

 

I had the opportunity to photograph the Amerian activist poet, writer and journalist, John Beecher, in 1976 for an Asheville arts monthly named The Arts Journal. Beecher was descended from the same family of New England abolitionists that produced Harriet Beecher Stowe and actively wrote about the American Labor and Civil Rights Movements. He was living in Burnsville when I met him, eking out a living as a printer and publisher. He had lost his teaching job at San Francisco State University in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era, for refusing to sign a state loyalty oath. The law was overturned in 1967 and he was reinstated to his teaching position in 1977. Beecher returned to San Francisco State in 1979 for what turned out to be the last year of his life.

I took Mr. Beecher a copy of this print and a copy of The Arts Journal, which had run it on the cover. He looked at it and said, “It makes me look like Job.” I sensed he wasn’t exactly pleased with the representation. But as I thought about Beecher’s life of activism and integrity, and the losses he had suffered because of it, I realized the likeness with Job was perhaps more than just mere representation.

 

Cameras, Guns, and Stealing Souls

Every couple of years, a few of my photographer friends come out to our land to shoot guns. We walk far back into the woods, mount targets on trees, and blast away; usually doing more damage to grass and soil than we do to the targets or the trees that hold them. This photograph is of my friend Larry White, a fine art photographer and former instructor at UNCA, shooting a .45 caliber Colt revolver owned by our mutual friend, Ben Porter, and used by Ben’s father in World War II.

I’ve long been fascinated by the likenesses between cameras and guns. The similar language comes first to mind – the loading and unloading, the shooting, the aiming and framing, the “target rich environment” photographers sometimes refer to when discussing an image-filled situation. But it is the actual making of photographs, and the stoppage of time that occurs every time we press a camera’s shutter, that is perhaps most analogous to the firing of guns.

The sole purpose of firearms is, of course, to stop time, to end the life of whatever we shoot at. Now, I understand we often use guns to threaten and to protect, or in the case of my buddies in the woods, to practice our marksmanship and bond in a manly kind of way. But the primary purpose of a gun is to kill – to stop the life of whatever or whoever it is pointed at.

One might say that cameras and pictures are not nearly so nefarious. Yes, they too stop time, but they do so for the sake of memory. Time is momentarily stilled, but life goes on beyond the image. While we don’t physically end someone’s life when we make their photograph, I would argue that we can, and often do, choose to use our cameras as tools for character assassination – to embarrass a political candidate perhaps or by posting an unflattering photograph of someone on Facebook. One only has to think of the body language that came into use with the invention of photography – the hands over the face, the shielding from view – to understand the power of this tool.

Years ago, when I started making photographs in a serious way, I heard of people who wouldn’t allow photographs to be made of themselves because they believed pictures stole a person’s soul. It was easy enough to dismiss these beliefs as primitive or unsophisticated, but the longer I’ve worked in this medium; the more I understand the truth of those “primitive” beliefs. I don’t call it “soul stealing,” but I know every time I trip the shutter of my camera, I’m trying to capture the essence of a person or situation, and fix it in time for all the world to see.

My Father

 

My father, had he lived, would have been ninety-four years old on September 15. He died of a mix of what I think of as modern ailments – diabetes, high blood pressure, and a persistent melanoma that began on his leg and eventually traveled to his brain. He passed in February, 2002, a few months shy of his 84th birthday, and shortly before publication of my first book, Sodom Laurel Album. That he didn’t live to see the book, or hear my lecture on the book at the Library of Congress, is one of the great regrets of my life.

Dad, and my mother too, was a product of the Great Depression and that experience was communicated to me, his oldest child, in the form of suggestions regarding what I should major in in college. I wanted to study history and anthropology and English although at the time I certainly had no idea how one made a living with such esoteric interests. Dad, thinking practically, and with his long memory of difficult times as a teenager, suggested business because I would always be able to get a job.

I got my degree in Personnel Management, but business didn’t stick with me. I spent more than a few years searching for the right fit, eventually coming back to my first love of writing and, a later learned-love, photography. My decision to pursue my art was difficult for both of my parents to understand or accept. Why would I not use my degree? Why would I choose a profession with such insecurity attached to it? Why would I pick something I knew so little about? My father, while mystified, also told me he would be proud of anything I did as long as I was productive. 

Some years later, after some success, when it seemed my decision had been the right one, my father revisited the decision that sent me to business school. We were at an exhibit of my work in Charlotte and he was talking with a friend who was filming the conversation for posterity. He explained his insistence that I take business, my pleas to study the humanities, and my ultimate stubbornness about following my own path. At that point in the conversation, he looked around the gallery and said, “But this is really nice work.”

That sentence was perhaps my father’s most important gift to me. In those few short words, he gave me acceptance and understanding while  showing me his own ability to change and be flexible. But most importantly, he gave me an important message about parenting, about accepting our children for who they are, not who we want them to be. 

 

 

Heard at the Harris Family Reunion

 

I live in the past a lot of times. I go to sleep at night and dream of what happened years ago.

When we was coming up, the old people would be sitting and talking and they wouldn't want the children to sit and listen. They'd say, 'go off and play.' So, we didn't know nothing, unless we asked them, and it was very little that we could ask them about.

I did hear one time that Grandma and Grandpa run off and got married. He went into the Army at 17. He was a Confederate soldier. I've got his certificate. I remember him saying that when he was in the Army, he was going down the road and he found a piece of cornbread in the wagon tracks. He said he didn't shave much dirt off that cornbread because he was so hungry. He said it tasted like candy.

I remember the first linoleum that daddy ever got. Me and Howard thought that was something special. We got down and just sat on it and slid all over the floor.

‘You make a quilt every year and you'll never go without cover,’ Grandma said.

Like my sister, my older sister, when she lived in Washington, she had a neighbor whose husband was sick with cancer. And Laura was out hanging up clothes and she hollered out over to the neighbor, ‘Mrs. Cheney, how is your husband doing?' Mrs. Cheney answered back, 'I guess he's doing all right, I buried him six months ago.' And Laura didn't even know he was dead. That's just about the way it's got. We live right beside one another, but we don't mix with the people. We don't take the time.

I thought about it as we were coming up the road. I would like to have a paper and write down everybody's names, like yours, and your children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Somebody, some day, is gonna want that record.