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Vicki Lane is the author The Day of Small Things (coming September 28!) and of the Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries which include Signs in the Blood, Art's Blood, Old Wounds, Anthony-nominated In a Dark Season, and Under the Skin (coming from Bantam Dell in 2011.) Vicki draws her inspiration from the rural western NC county where she and her family have lived on a mountainside farm since 1975. Visit Vicki at her daily blog, her website or go HERE to learn more about The Day of Small Things.
Fierce Old Women
by Vicki Lane
Thanks, Kaye for inviting me! You asked for pictures of where we do our writing. Well, this is my official writing spot – a comfy chair in the corner of an upstairs room that also houses my sewing/painting/quilting/giftwrapping/ironing stuff.
In summer it’s unbearably hot.
So I’ve been camped out in a corner of the living room for the past three months.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about Fierce Old Women -- some I’ve known well, others, only at second or even third hand. They all share virtual DNA with Miss Birdie – Elizabeth Goodweather’s octogenarian neighbor who is the protagonist of my new book.
My first introduction to these Fierce Old Women was when we moved to the North Carolina mountains in 1975. (Back then, sixty-something seemed old. I’ve adjusted my idea of old a good bit.)
At that time, I knew about Sweet Old Ladies – my grandmother’s friends in Tampa who played bridge and arranged flowers and were on the Altar Guild. They were always nicely dressed and they went to the beauty parlor once a week to emerge with freshly blue-tinted coiffures.
Louise, my nearest neighbor in the mountains, wasn’t like that at all.
Louise and her husband grew tobacco, milked two cows, raised hogs and chicken and were the hardest working people I’d ever met. Clifford taught my husband how to plow with mules, and how to butcher hogs; Louise showed me how to wring a chicken’s neck and turn it into supper.
She was a no-nonsense woman, as she had to be. She did love her flowers though and had a row of them in tin cans on her porches. One day a ground hog – a noted garden scourge – had made his way up the steps and was nosing about the potted plants. Louise called her husband to come quick with his shotgun.
“But, Louise,” he protested. “I’m afraid I’ll tear up yore flowers.’
Louise didn’t hesitate. “Forgit the flowers -- shoot the ground hog!”
Mearl was another neighbor – tough as nails and never happier than when out building fence or weed-eating. It’s her voice I hear when Miss Birdie says, “Come on in and git you a chair.”
One of her daughters told me how one day Mearl, who had begun to have some unexplained spells, began to get ‘swimmie-headed’ and felt that she was about to pass out. Her grown son, there visiting that day, grabbed her. “Mama, I love you,” he said urgently, not knowing if this might be IT.
“We ain’t got time for that now,” Mearl snapped. “Call 911!”
I met Grace when our cattle went wandering down the other side of the mountain. She and her husband lived in the same cabin Grace had been born in -- a cabin high up an unimproved road, a cabin with no electricity. They were still farming in their late seventies.
Grace kept a little book in which she recorded daily happenings – a new calf, visitors, rain -- and I gave this charming habit to Miss Birdie.
Paul and Grace had no children – but they adopted all us ‘transplants’ as their own. And at the end of every phone call or visit Grace would say, “We love you.”
While Miss Birdie's voice and character draw from my own neighbors -- Grace Henderson, Mearl Davis, Louise Freeman --- and from fictional characters -- you can find Birdie's kin in Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, in Kathryn Stripling Byer's Black Shawl or Wildwood Flower, and in The Foxfire Books, to name only a few -- I've never pictured Birdie as looking like anyone I know. A bit like the picture above that a friend sent me,maybe.
But then another friend showed me a photo she’d taken back in the seventies. Oda Blankenship of Pipestem, West Virginia is as close the Miss Birdie in my mind as can be.
I love the way Oda's face and hands sum up her life.
The world's going to be a poorer place when all the old women have had face lifts and other 'work' done and all look like Joan Rivers clones.
These wonderful, fierce old women -- everywhere I go I hear their stories. Not long ago a new acquaintance told me about her octogenarian aunt, up on the roof hammering down shingles. (Didn't I have Aunt Omie doing something like that in Dark Season?)
So many stories waiting to be told -- in my family and yours, among my neighbors and yours.
So many stories waiting to be told -- in my family and yours, among my neighbors and yours.
Let's hear it for fierce old women!
