Our son Scott is getting married to Rachel in two weeks and we have the Reception here at the old farm house. Lots of spiffin' up to do, as Denise prepares the place to look nice, and I work on the lawn and fields.
In the Ozarks, when I was growing up, I was always fascinated by how the native Ozarkers, some of which were very poor but didn't know it, would dress up their homesteads. They would take old tires, bury them half way in the ground, paint the top side with white paint, and line the driveway with them. They would take an old Tractor Tire, paint it white, lay it out in the yard and plant flowers inside it. They would save their blue Milk Of Magnesia bottles, peel the labels off and hang them in the tree in the front yard, kind like decorating a Christmas Tree, but this was year round. The old man of the homestead might have everything he ever drove, somewhere on his property, up on blocks or flat on the ground, pieces of broken farm equipment all over the barn lot, but the Lady of the House had a natural desire for beauty, in whatever form she could find, and she made-do with scraps and left-overs. I've seen them plant flowers around an old rusty tractor that was left in the front yard, and turned into Yard Art.
I love the spirit of the backwoods people. Proud, hard working, if you needed something-you either made it yourself, or did without. I've got a collection of wooden hand tools, carved from chunks of wood, mallets, big fence post drivers, yokes, and other pieces that these mountain people carved out of natural resources, to do the jobs that had to be done. They had no money, yet they would never consider themselves poor. Appalachia and the Ozark mountain chains just reared a different breed of folks. Fiercely independent, strong family circle, spiritual, uneducated but smart…salt of the earth people.
My ancestors in the Arkansas Ozarks were totally isolated, with the closest neighbor being miles away over the next mountain. They arrived in the area of Northwest Arkansas in the 1830’s, when it was just wilderness. That was their choice of how to live. They had left Tennessee cause they felt like it was getting too crowded, when you could see the smoke of another chimney on the next mountain.
A rough lifestyle, particularly for the women. But, the desire for fixin’ up the place to look pretty was strong in them. Flowers, blooming bushes, dug up from the woods and replanted in the yards, old broken equipment…if it sat in one spot for too long, paint it white and plant flowers around it.
You just cannot starve a creative spirit…it will come out in some form or fashion. The simple things in life, that make it worth the living.
The picture below was one we took along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. Stan
No comments:
Post a Comment