I looked in my old Webster’s New World Dictionary (copyright 1957), my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (copyright 2003), and, finally, I typed the word into my internet prompt line.  But none of them showed a trace of the word footlog.  So I concluded from that search that all of the walking world except certain parts of Appalachia don’t know how to get across the creek without getting their feet wet.

Back in the day, when everyone walked just about everywhere they went around this part of the country, footlogs were a very common sight.  They served a very essential purpose.  Many times when your destination required crossing creeks, you would encountered a problem as you approached little streams.  In the first place, the creek banks were often very steep.  The steep banks were the result of many centuries of erosion.  If a person had on their Sunday-go-to-meeting-shoes, just getting down to the creek itself could destroy his (or her) personal appearance when they got to church.  And then, sometimes, the creeks were running high and you could not get across them at all.

Footlogs were a very common sight as I was growing up.  Sometimes they were very crude.  Someone would just saw down a rather large tree, cut all the limbs off it and secure each end of it on both sides of the creek.  They would usually dig a little trench for each end of the log to rest in so it wouldn’t wiggle when someone put their weight on it. Such a footlog was very common if the creek banks were very narrow and it only took a few steps to get across.

But if the banks were widely separated, it was sometimes quite a task to construct a footlog.  I can recall watching men haul the log to one side of the creek with a horse, hook a couple of log chains to it, then take the horse to the other side and snake the other end of the log up to where they could place it securely.  It was no easy task.  In addition, if the span was pretty wide, they would usually hew off one side of the log to make it more or less level.  I can recall a couple of my aunts crossing a footlog in high heeled shoes as they walked to church.  This particular footlog consisted of two logs, side by side, both hewed off on one side. That allowed for a pretty smooth crossing.

As we all know, it was a custom among all of the older generation Appalachians to take something that was designed to be practical and make it a work of art.  Quilts are a classic example of that.  The quilt’s purpose was to keep a person warm, but many of them were created to be beautiful as well as practical.  I saw the same thing happen with footlogs.  Some of them became works of art.

I remember one in particular that was constructed by one of my distant neighbors.  It consisted of two logs, placed snuggly side by side, and both were nicely hued off on one side with a broad ax.  He fashioned nice hand rails on each side and put a little arch entryway on each end.  I have searched in vain for a picture of it but to no avail.

As I searched for the word footlog in dictionaries and internet sites I was again reminded that all of the people in the world who think they are so smart and know everything don’t know squat about how to make do with what you’ve got and to make something pretty in the process.

Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County. Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

Fifteen million dollars will be shelled out this month in a national attempt show our love to each other; stuffed animals, chocolate, perfume, chocolate, flowers…and did I mention chocolate? Oh yes, and cards filled with mushy words…

Please bear with me as I express my words of devotion not to an individual person, but to a place. Even though my love letter is personal and specific to Hacker Valley and Red Gate Farm, I believe it reflects sentiment most West Virginians feel towards their own special place.  (The first line is borrowed from Elizabeth Browning.)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1.  I love that you don’t get in a hurry. The morning sun takes its time coming down the hill after it tops over the ridge letting the frost linger in the shadows and  fallen leaves that it’s outlined.

2.  I treasure the vivid backdrop you paint for my childhood memories and those of my parents. For example, fifty yards from the front door I can stand in the cool waters of the Holly River and laugh as I imagine my mom and her sister as youngsters involuntarily baptizing all their hens. (As the hens would willingly crouch down for the rooster, mom and auntie would pluck them up, run out the door of the chicken house “of ill repute”, and dunk them under the “cleansing” waters of the Holly.)

3.  I am mesmerized by the wind currents swirling around and through the mountains. Once in the hayfield on Balli Mountain, the clouds, being encouraged along on a blessed breeze, cast shadows that washed over us like waves in the ocean. The only appropriate response was to stop raking and catch my breath only to have it taken away again in awe.

4.  I love the exhilaration of riding dirt bikes in the meadow under a blue sky, or catching spring peepers in the ditch. You enable me, for just a few moments, to step outside my role of housewife and mom and be a kid again.

5.  In addition to the usual flora and fauna like dandelions and black bears, you go the extra mile and give us wine berries, ramps, doodle-bugs, and ferrydiddles. Oh, and there is a marvelous patch of touch-me-knots on Sleepy Pugh Hill that means more to me than a dozen roses.

6.  You are a marvelous teacher who encourages us to think outside the box to fix things, which I’m impressed to say nine times out of ten involve duct tape.

7.  I love to go barefoot and feel the mud between my toes more than a pedicure! And the mudslide behind the house that my ten year old son discovered was marvelous.  He slid down on his belly repeatedly and we had to hose him off with the garden hose.

8.  Thanks for challenging me. There are endless opportunities there to push oneself beyond what you think you can do…cutting briars (filth) with a heavy gas-powered weed eater for five hours till your side bruises…or putting up hay as temperatures soar into the 90’s–physical challenges that when met builds confidence as well as character.

9.  I think it’s cool that a traffic jam is when a tree falls across the road until someone comes along with a chain-saw in their trunk (sooner than you might think).

10.  Night is so truly defined you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. When the moon is full the entire valley is illuminated so barns and trees cast purple shadows. Looking up at the starry sky makes me humble.

After 44 years together, I appreciate you now more than ever. Happy Valentine’s Day to Red Gate Farm and the special people who live there. My heart aches when we are far apart—for it is with you that my heart sings the prettiest love song.

I miss you, Janet

    Janet Fliegel is a WV farmgirl currently surviving in a suburb of Cincinnati. 

Fall and falling leaves bring so many memories:

• shuffling through dry leaves that covered sidewalks as I walked to school
• raking huge piles of leaves and then jumping into them until they were reduced to mulch
• or raking the leaves into “rooms” to make a playhouse that provided hours of entertainment
• wandering through the yard collecting pretty colored leaves to dip into wax and put onto a straw wreath for a door decoration
• putting red and yellow leaves between two sheets of wax paper and ironing the paper to preserve the color for a least a little while
• gathering acorns for my mother, who carefully put them into pretty dishes
• looking for wooly worms and predicting the weather by their stripes
• blowing milkweed seeds out of their pods, then bringing the pods inside to make decorations
• looking for ripe persimmons
• searching roadsides for the orange bittersweet berries
• finding my knee socks and cardigan sweaters
• watching shadows stretch across the yards as dusk returned
• gathering clothes from the clothesline in near-darkness as autumns’ winds blustered

I am sure I can think of more to add to the list. But what about you? What memories do the falling leaves trigger for you?

I enjoyed Sunday surrounded by my three boys and a daughter-in-law. My oldest son works 6 days a week and we don’t get to see him as often as I would like. It was a nice get together.

We enjoyed eating dinner with the memories of past mothers in our family surrounding us.

We ate on dishes that had belonged to Charley’s mother. This was the china I remember her using when I was dating Charley in the 1970s. She used them often, not just on special occasions. I think that is the way it should be. We don’t have the whole set, many had been chipped and broken down through the years. I was lucky and found a group of the exact same dishes at a church yard sale last year. No one else wanted them — and on the last day I paid half price for the box of assorted pieces to add to ours.

Some of the fondest memories of my youth involve the big gatherings at my grandmother’s house on Sundays. Most of these big get-togethers happened during the summer months and it was always a grand time. All of the kids got to spend some time with their cousins as the old folks visited on the porches. But the best time of all was mealtime. There was always a feast, a feast fit for a king and all of his loyal followers.

Most dining room tables in those days were designed for eight or ten people so that meant that everyone did not get to sit down together. But there was never any question about who got to sit at the table.  The men always ate first and they got the best of the feast.  I began to notice that when I was very young.

The women would all stand around in the kitchen and talk. They made sure that all of the serving dishes were kept full and that the tea glasses and coffee cups were filled as needed. The kids were given a plate and could go to the porch and find a place to sit down.

Once the men finished eating the women would all gather around the table and eat what was left. Most usually they would linger over the meal for a long time and engage in good conversation. Once the meal was finally over, the women set about the task of cleaning up the kitchen while the men went outside and continued their visit. I do not ever once recall any of the men helping out in the kitchen.

After I grew up and had my own family, those Sunday and holiday gatherings began to happen at my mother’s house. And even though the world had changed drastically by that time and was full of “thoroughly modern Millies,” that old tradition held fast. The men still ate first. I can still see my mother standing in the kitchen, snacking on something until the men left the table. And, the women still did the cleanup chores.

I thought for a while that it might have been just a tradition among my family.  But when I married a Webster County girl and began to attend family gatherings at her house, I noticed the very same routine. The men ate first at the table, the kids scattered about with a plate, and the women ate last.

I don’t even like to admit this but the tradition has held fast in my own family. Only two things have changed. Most of the big gatherings at my house have involved musicians. Worthless musicians. And my wife always makes sure that the men get the choice seats at the table while the wives hang out in the kitchen. The other change is that I usually help out with the cleanup chores in the kitchen.  Yes, I know. Many of you will ask my wife the next time you see her if I really do help.

I often wonder if all of those “outsiders” who have migrated from the four, six, and eight lanes onto the two lanes are aware of this old mountain tradition. I highly suspect
that it is fast fading.

Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County.  Visit his website at http://www.macksamples.com.

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When the blue northern blows in January and February most of us in modern America set the thermostat at 70 degrees and sit around, read or watch television in our shirt sleeves during the day and retire to a comfortable bedroom at night.  We pay little attention to the outside temperatures.  But for those of us who grew up in these hills, it wasn’t always that way.  When the blue northern blew when I was a kid, I felt it.  Especially at night.

Some of you may well recall what it felt like to live in a house with no insulation, single pane windows, and no central heat.  In many of the old houses, there was no heat at all in the bedrooms.  The heater, whether it was wood, coal, or natural gas was usually situated in the living area.  The living area and the kitchen usually stayed pretty warm during the day if your house had a wood or coal heater.  But toward the wee hours of the morning, when the fire began to burn low, it even got chilly in those areas.

But the bedrooms were especially brutal.  That’s why most of the beds were equipped with four or five blankets on each bed, or sometimes a heavy quilted comforter.  I can well recall getting up in my bedroom on a zero morning and observing a thin coat of ice on the inside of each window.  Many times the inner walls would also be covered with ice.  The walls and the windows would sweat, then freeze solid.  I can even remember some mornings when the blankets were frozen to the wall.

You could stay pretty warm as long as you were under the covers, but when you got up, you felt like you were in a freezer.  Few rooms had closets so, in my own case, I just dropped my clothes on the floor at night when I retired.  I would lay in bed as long as I could, but once it came time to get up, I would leap out of bed, grab my britches off the floor, and race to the living room to dress, teeth chattering the whole time.

It all makes me wonder when I listen to television commentators warning us to stay inside when it gets a little cold outside.  I watched lots of people get up on mornings when it was ten or fifteen below zero, go to the barn and milk, and do all of the other outside chores.  My dad walked a mile to work everyday and paid no attention to below zero weather.  In those days, there was no insulated underwear or high dollar Carhartts around to keep a person warm. Dad just put a pair of bib overalls on over his work pants, pulled on an old denim jacket, stuck his chin into the wind and took off.

Yet, during all of the years of my youth, I never once heard of anyone dying of hyperthermia. Maybe folks just are not as tough as they used to be. Or, more likely, we are just spoiled and can stand a lot more than we think we can.

Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County.  Visit his website at http://www.macksamples.com.

To enjoy all the articles from the March 2011 issue, visit one of our distribution locations, or purchase the PDF file here.

I don’t care much for crowds, so by the time the Holiday season rolls around, I have my Christmas shopping done. We also don’t watch television, so we aren’t bomarded with holiday commercials and Christmas specials. Because these commercialized facets of the season have limited access to our lives, it takes some action on our part to bring the feeling of Christmas into our home.

The grand project  for creating the Christmas spirit in our home is the Christmas Tree.  While Suzanne McMinn discusses her love for an imperfect tree with us this year,  I, lean towards the perfect tree. For me, a Christmas tree is a work of art — a process that spans through several days until I get it “just right.”

We haven’t purchased ornaments in years. Like many things in our home, our ornaments are family hand me downs, colors of past Christmas themes, gifts from Christmases past, the last two  unbroken porcelain bells that hung on my Grandmother’s tree.

Our Christmas tree, for me, is decorated in memories. When I read Janet Smart’s piece this month on collecting holiday memories, I realized I had already done so with my collection of ornaments. Granny Sue has collected memories in her Mistletoe Ball, and Charlotte Spears has her Christmas memories collected in her mother’s tablecloths.
Funny how few people remember the gifts they got when they remember Christmases past.

I have ornaments that are older than I am. I have ornaments that my sister decorated, that my mother painted, that were given to me by a friend who died much too young. I have colors from every palette my Mother used to decorate her themed trees over the years. (I also inherited my tendencies for the perfect tree from her.)
I once considered having a color themed tree, but found that the process left too many ornaments — too many memories — in the box, not included in the holiday.
My sentimental side wouldn’t allow it.

So instead, I try to balance the tree not only by color and size, but also by featuring ornaments that attached to especially deep or fond memories. Grandma’s porcelain bells go near the top, the woodland creatures from Joanne peek out from both high and low. The ornaments my sister decorated are sprinkled throughout, and featured pieces from Mother’s past trees are strategically placed where the lights are brightest.

No wonder it takes me a week to decorate the Christmas tree. Each ornament takes me for a walk down memory lane.

*   *   *   *

This year, my family is gathering at our house for Christmas. My mother, my sister, my niece, her husband and five year old son will be with us for four days. My sister and niece live in Virginia, and my mother in Ohio, so we don’t see each other often enough. I’d like to  literally “spruce up” the house a little more than normal for the family, and I think I’ll make use of the pine boughs and pine cones in the yard as Judy Wolfram suggests in her column. I don’t have to go anywhere to get the decorations, they’re free and I won’t have to store them when Christmas has passed.

I also have a collection of candles I’ll be putting to use, but I’m having problems making sure they will be out of reach of a five year old. In fact, I’m going to have to make sure a lot of things are put out of reach of a five year old. And yet, Aiden will be the one who makes the day truly special. The one who still believes in the magic, who loves every present and hands them out with a sense of joy and opens his own with innocent anticipation.

No matter how I decorate, no matter what we cook or give or receive — it will be the five year old who will truly make it Christmas for the rest of us. But how we decorate, what we cook, how we celebrate and how, not what, we give and receive will make his Christmas memories.

Perhaps, years from now, he’ll have ornaments from my tree, or will recall Christmases in West Virginia when he smells pine. Maybe his Christmas dinner won’t seem complete without Aunt Leigh’s chocolate mint jelly or corn on the cob that tastes just picked. Maybe he’ll play Apples to Apples with his children, or Uno with his grand children, and say, “When I was your age, I played this game with my MeeMaw, Nana, Aunt Leigh and Uncle Frank.”

Who knows what traditions we start or honor this Christmas will attach to the memories in his mind? Will he remember his family lined along the pew at Christmas eve service? Will he remember that the dog got presents too? Perhaps he’ll remember the Canadian geese squawking all night on Christmas eve. All I know is that this year, I get to help create those magical moments and memories of the season.

Aiden will be making Christmas truly happen for us, and we’ll be making Christmas memories for him.

*   *   *   *

To be honest, I’ve had a hard time getting that Christmas feeling since my father died and my mother sold their house. I can no longer go home for the holidays. Without the ornaments, trinkets and memories we have kept and relocated, in many ways it feels we’re starting our Christmas traditions from scratch.

This season, I know there are others struggling to find the spirit of the season. We have columnists who are caring for aging parents, others who suffer a first time holiday without a recently lost loved one or following a divorce. Two of our columnists have lost their homes in fires since our last issue,  while others suffer from serious health issues.

We are trained in life it seems to focus on what we don’t have. And yet, it is when we realize that so many others have less that we come to appreciate our own blessings. There’s a side of me that wishes I had more than a cluttered country home to play hostess in – a side of me that I try to ignore. I try to listen to the side that is simply thankful I have a home, a roof over my head, heat, water, love, health.

I’d much rather look through my clutter for donatable items someone else needs more than I, looking away from the carpet that needs replaced or the duct tape that covers a crack in our jacuzzi tub. It makes the difference between that gnawing feeling that we don’t have (or aren’t) enough and the comfortable knowledge that we have much more than we really need.

This season, focus on needs and not wants, and then seek to fill those needs. That is truly the essence of giving that comes with the season. A gift that fills a need is a gift from the heart — be that the gift of time, or attention, or love, or kindness. Those are the gifts that build memories.                ~Lisa