Pop Goes The World
Joann Ware
Tomorrow I know many of our readers will be getting together with family for a big Thanksgiving meal. For me, family feasts on the actual day of Thanksgiving are unfortunately a thing of the past. But my father’s family still likes to gather on the Sunday before Turkey Day to share a meal and memories.
This past Sunday we converged on au nt Carolyn and uncle J i m m y ’s beautiful brick home in Forest. For years we would all meet up at my dad’s mother’s home in Amherst County. Her house was small, and it still astounds me that she could fit so many relatives into such a tiny space, but we all had a place to sit and enjoy a reliably delicious dinner. Our numbers have diminished over the years but there were still 20 of us in attendance on Sunday. There are no small children in the family now. They have all grown up. Even so, I still expect them to be little when I see them.
My cousins Debbie and Teresa lost their mother last year and their father the year before that. They are still working through their grief, which is always magnified during the holidays. I can only tell them that holidays get easier to manage over time, but you never quite get over missing those who made these joyful times of the year so special.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be a gift-free holiday, but I received two unexpected gifts on Sunday from my aunt Carolyn. She had been going through some things in an old chest and found a school picture of my father that I had never seen before. He looked like a very typical 1950s teenager in the photo, sporting a flat top, a sports jacket and a tie. He looked a little like The Big Bopper, only smaller and younger. What I found so charming about the picture was his genuine smile. I don’t know what the photographer said or did to get him to smile that way. Maybe Dad was told, “Hey, kid. Did anyone ever tell you that you look like The Big Bopper?”
Carolyn also gave me a report card Dad got from attending a vacation Bible school as a youth. He received many stars for scripture memorization and a gold crown sticker for completion of work.
Because we are a Southern family, there was an abundance of sweet tea and a table full of sliced turkey with a plethora of sides including three kinds of potatoes – mashed, sweet and funeral. There was also a table of desserts teeming with tempting treats.
In Carolyn’s sunny dining room after dinner was over, I sat and listened to Carolyn and her oldest sister, Barbara, talk in fluidly musical tones. I can hear in their voices echoes of the way the settlers who came from Western Europe spoke as well as the inflection of the native people who had been living in the hills and mountains for centuries before colonization. While they were telling their stories, their voices carried the hum of not only the history of our family, but the history of the region itself.
On the way home, I observed the deep ridges etched in the mountains and felt their permanence. These mountains are some of the oldest on Earth. They have witnessed the world before the existence of man and will probably still stand after we’re all gone.
I consider myself a Shenandoah Valley girl, but I know part of me is from the mountains. In the community of Monroe, my grandmother, Audrey Davis, met and married her husband, Robert Alver Ware, and they had five children who had children of their own and though I do not speak in their accents, I tell their stories. I feel the mountains hold their voices. I think sometimes that the mist that hangs over the mountains in the morning contains the smoke from the hearths of the houses of many generations who called those mountains home.
