Down the Holler (Costa)

Annie Hogsett's post, "A Time for Cooking," (June 16) made me feel as though she miscounted, and that there are really five -- not two -- women, only two of us still corporeal, standing in her kitchen: Annie, her mother, my grandmother, my mother, and I. Hers was a West Virginia hardship story. So's this one, taken one generation farther back. Like Annie's mom, my West Virginia-born mom, Mary Frances Zinn, was a high school English teacher, but Annie's mom's anthem, "Are you going to throw that out? It's a perfectly good [fill in the blank]; "Cut that part off. It's fine" applied to food.

Thankfully, in my own mom that same anthem applied to old or secondhand garments. Both these moms, though, had the Great Depression schooling of squeezing the last smidgen of worth out of anything at all. I have a theory that skills skip generations. My grandmother, Gathie Zinn, couldn't sew. So my mother had to. And I do not. My grandmother, though, in order to keep the family literally from starving in Appalachia during that Depression, had what she called her "truck gardens," and an enviable green thumb. The only thing my mother could grow was. . .me. As Annie points out in her post, we reach an age and crazy dire times when we peel, as Ahab would say, to "a little lower layer." To our amazement, we know our family stories in new and (finally! sheesh!) applicable ways. "Cut that part off. It's fine." Use what's usable. Get on with it. No waste, no whining. Everything from a green spot on a hunk of cheddar to a rip in a shopworn dress bought on final sale at Hit or Miss.

The family story I'd like to share has to do with a ride home from visiting "kin" in the next holler or over the next hill, on Sunday, October 30, 1938. In the car were Lawrence, who was my mother's older brother, and his wife and young daughter, and Gathie, my grandfather Albert Zinn (Gathie always called him just plain Zinn), and my mother, who was fifteen. Zinn worked in construction in those days, mostly moving houses to make way for highways, and there wasn't a whole lot of either. During the ride, my uncle Lawrence turned on the radio to some dance music, when suddenly the broadcast was interrupted by a news flash. A curious cylindrical object had landed on a farm outside Grover's Mill, New Jersey, and emerging from the cylinder were Martians attacking with heat-ray guns. Earth had been invaded by Mars. All talk in the family car abruptly ceased, Lawrence switched off the radio, and into the horrified silence came Gathie's voice: "I hope we get home soon. I have to pack Zinn's pail."

Two generations down the road, we talk about choosing our priorities like we're picking chocolates from a candy box. Such an indulgence. In Gathie's time, there was really no choosing. You did what you must. Everything was at stake. If the Martians didn't make it to that particular West Virginia holler by noon tomorrow, well, at least Zinn was going to have his lunch. What sums it all up is another story, another evening, just before Christmas, the year my mother was seven. As poor as they were, she had been lobbying hard for a beautiful doll from Santa. But then after they thought she was in bed asleep, she peeked at Gathie and Zinn through a crack in the door, and watched as her mother sat trying to spiffy up a sad-sack dolly. There was nothing Gathie could do with the matted hair, but she tried fluffing up the dress. "She'll know it's second hand," Zinn said sorrowfully. "Hush, Zinn," said Gathie. Then: "We've done our best." That was more than my grandmother speaking. That was the generation. That was the era in American history.

I belong to a generation with its great and dazzling blares of exceptionalism, no denying. But unlike my grandmother's, or my mother's, I'm not convinced I can say we've done our best. How lucky we've been, and how, in some ways, incomplete. Me, in these uncertain pandemic times, I take to heart the West Virginia wisdom that very quietly rises above the howls equating masks and social distancing with enslavement: "Cut that part off. It's fine." In the face of an enemy more frightening, finally, than Martians, who took one look around and thought better of the whole thing, apparently, I'd say now's a good time to go find a lunch pail to pack.

Shelley Costa is currently Stephanie Cole, author of a mystery series set in Tuscany, and an alum of the CWRU English Department, where she earned her PhD. She's learning the violin, art history, and Zoom, and lives in Chagrin Falls.