Homecoming

This is a photo taken at a homecoming at the Chestnut Grove Baptist Church near Hix in Summers County, West Virginia. Front row, left to right:  unidentified gentleman, Irma Amick Ballengee, Frank Burdette, Gladys Burdette, Tom Shephard.  Back row:  Fred Lively, Callie Shepherd, Red Ballengee, Mr. Lively (Hub?).

In the olden days, when my mind was quicker and my joints didn't hurt so much, late in the summer churches held get-togethers that everyone called a Homecoming.  Some churches today continue that tradition, but it just doesn't seem to have the dramatic effect that homecomings used to have.

My family attended Sewell Valley Baptist Church in Rainelle, West Virginia.  Sewell Valley really knew how to put on a homecoming.  The homecoming itself was a one-day event on Sunday, but the preparation began days ahead of time with the cooking taking up most of the Saturday before.  And please understand, this was not a hot dog and hamburger kind of picnic.  No.  These dinners-on-the-grounds were complete home-cooked meals with a meat, two vegetables, salad, and dessert.  Sometime in the 1960s my mother bought a contraption that consisted of five or six round metal containers into which the various dishes could be placed.  The containers were then stacked on each other, making a column which was clasped into a wire-like handle and carried forth to share at the homecoming.  It was the high-tech way to transport cooked food, and it sure beat cramming bowls and pots of hot food into a cardboard box.

Homecoming at Sewell Valley started with the regular church services, Sunday school followed by worship during which a guest preacher usually delivered the sermon. There was singing.  Oh, there was lots of singing. After the blessing was pronounced at the end of the sermon, everyone trooped out to the long wooden tables that had been set up under the trees in front of the church.  On those tables the women (this was not a job for men) had set out the various dishes they'd brought, all home-cooked and still a little warm.  This was the time for adults to visit, children to play, for the men to sneak away from the crowd to smoke cigarettes.   When the music started inside the church, that was the cue for everyone to trickle inside for the afternoon "singing" which lasted into late afternoon.

Of course, homecoming was the time for those who had moved away to return and visit family and friends.  They came back to their home church.  My father, Red Ballengee, did not have much contact with family or friends once he left Summers County.  His parents were dead; he had some half-brothers and sisters, but he'd not maintained contact with them.  I think it was my mother who encouraged him to drive back up Sourwood Mountain to see if things had changed, and I also think it might have been so that I, who was in my early teens, could see where my dad had grown up.  The friends he visited, especially Mr. Tom Shephard (I think he was one of my dad's teachers) and his daughter, Callie, suggested that my dad come to the Homecoming at Chestnut Grove Baptist Church.

Chestnut Grove was a small church, but the building was overflowing at that Homecoming.  Other than the picture I took of my parents, my uncle and his wife, and my dad's friends in front of the church, the only other thing that I remember of that day is that I was recruited to play the piano for the singing.  I play the piano only a little, by reading music, not by ear.  This means that I can only play the songs as they are written in the hymnal.  If you insist on improvising your singing while I accompany you on the piano, you will rapidly be singing a cappella. When the call went out for a piano player that Sunday, my parents were all too happy to point out that I could play.  I managed to play the songs they were singing, because they used the songs I knew from the hymnal.  It wasn't terribly complicated.  I think it made my dad happy.

Other than being a little stressed because of the piano playing at Chestnut Grove, all my memories of homecomings are beautiful ones.  Homecomings were joyful, exciting times when you could count on being received with a smile at the old home church.  I don't think it's an accident that homecomings take place at churches.  This is our reminder of the great homecoming yet to be, when trials and pain are forgotten at the joy of being reunited with family and old friends.  There will be singing.  Yes, lots of singing.

Sunday School class at Chestnut Grove Baptist Church around 1921 or so.  Red Ballengee is the boy in the suit who looks remarkably like Opie Taylor.  

Pablo

This is not a short story.  It goes back to October 1991 when we moved into the house where we currently live.  At the time the housing development was brand new; our house was one of the first few houses to be built.  There were no trees, no grass, no flowers.  Just new homes in a sea of yellow straw spread on grass seed that was waiting to sprout.

By January 1992 we had found that our development was the favorite spot for people to drop off their unwanted dogs.  We took in a blonde shepherd mix who had been wandering around the neighborhood irritating people for a week or so.  She was extremely thin by the time we started feeding her, but she didn't stay thin for long.  Katie named her Tinkerbell, and we called her Tinker for short.  Her story will be saved for another day.

We had already had the one dog for a while when two black and white rapscallions found shelter under the porch of a house that was under construction down the street.  It didn't seem that they had been dropped off but were probably older dogs who had taken off for greener pastures and instead found themselves hungry and unloved by just about anyone who saw them.

Of course they were attracted to our house.  Katie never met a dog she didn't like, and there always seemed to be a bowl of dog food from which they could steal a bite, no matter how much I told Katie not to feed those dogs. One of the dogs was a short-haired hound of some kind with droopy ears.  He came to be known as Buddy, because he was Katie's buddy everywhere she went.  He also has an interesting story.

The subject of today's story was a larger dog, although he was not as big as a black lab.  He had long hair, also black and white, like a big border collie. Once you name the dog, you know, there is no going back.  The bigger dog was named Pablo.

I imagine that while Pablo was at our house was the first time in his life that he had ever been shown any affection.  We petted him and fed him, and he played with Katie and the other dogs.  At our house he was happy, although he (and Buddy, too) had a wandering streak that could not be subdued.  They both liked to go off for hours at a time to take care of dog business.  I tried tying them up in the back yard; they chewed through the leashes and pulled chains out of the ground.

Our new neighbors began to complain and started acting strange around us.  They were afraid of the dogs.  When families took an evening walk, our dogs barked at them.  This situation was not helped by those who carried huge sticks on these walks and struck at the dogs with the club.  Dogs are territorial and defensive.  If you want to tame a dog, start slowly and act kindly.  Don't beat the dog with a stick.

We suffered through meetings called by our neighbors, visits from the animal control officer, and humiliating conversations with our agitated neighbors.  It was not pleasant in our new home.  Plus we had the task of feeding and caring for three pretty-good-size dogs.  That summer we had a fence built around our yard so that we could keep the dogs up.  I remember the day it was finished; Larry's mom and dad were visiting us, and when the workers finished up, we put the dogs inside the fence and left to eat supper out.  It felt so good to not have to worry about where the dogs were.  When we got back home and pulled into the driveway, there sat dear Pablo in our front yard, and I swear he was smiling as if to say, "That fence was no challenge for me.  It was only a short jump for me to clear that piece of fence."  We were back to square one.

I had both Buddy and Pablo neutered because that is supposed to calm down male dogs, making them less interested in running around.

That fall it became clear that we had too many dogs, and I ran an ad saying that we had a dog to give away.  Pablo drew the short straw.  A farmer who lived up near Konnarock called us.  He was looking for another dog; I think he had lost one, but I don't really remember.  He came by the house, and he seemed to be a quiet man and peaceful.  He told us how when he walked around doing his farm work, his dog would affectionately slip his nose into the farmer's hand while they were walking.  He attached a leash to Pablo's collar and put him into the cab of his truck.  I cried.

Things settled down with our two dogs.  I missed Pablo; he was always attached to me, maybe because I usually fed him.  Maybe because I was kind to him.  Around Christmas time, on a day when the weather was unusually warm and sunny, I went down to the garage one evening after supper to close the garage door.  I lost my breath when I saw dear Pablo running toward me, coming up the little hill to our house, smiling in that way that dogs have when they are extremely happy.

Depending on where you are "around" Konnarock, it can be as much as 25 miles from our house.  Pablo had walked that 25 miles or so, smart enough to remember the way back to Applewood and determined enough to not give up until he reached the Estep house.  I called the farmer and told him that Pablo was at our house. He told me that he kept Pablo in the barn the first few days, but on Thursday he had let him out some, and as soon as he got out, Pablo took off.  The farmer mailed Pablo's tags back to us with a note that read, "He must love your family very much."

So we were back to our over-population of dogs.  We gave Buddy to a friend who lived in West Virginia, and before long she brought him back to us.  Buddy would not stay home.  And dogs being dogs, males seeking dominance in the pack, there came a day when Buddy and Pablo got into an explosive fight which I had to break up.  At that point I felt that something had to be done, even if it were something drastic, and I pretty much came to this conclusion by myself.

I called around several vet offices to see about making arrangements, so that by the time Larry came home from work that afternoon, I told him what I thought had to be done.  Larry said that if Pablo ever hurt Katie, he would kill him himself.  I took the leash and went out to the front porch where Pablo had lain in the corner since the fight.  I will never forget the subdued way he looked up at me, ears down, a cut on the top of his nose from the fight.  I hooked the leash to his collar, and he willingly followed me to the van.  He would have gone anywhere that I was going.  I didn't even stay with him at the vet's office; I left him there, sitting meekly in the waiting room, waiting his turn all by himself, but I was crying so hard that I couldn't say much to the assistant at the desk.

I don't know how many days I cried after that.  Larry called the vet's office the next day to see if they still had Pablo and to see if we could undo our directions.  No, they said, they don't hold those animals for a very long time.  But I knew that Pablo was gone before Larry called.  On the evening of the day I took Pablo to meet his fate, as I was washing dishes and looking out our kitchen window, I had the sense of Pablo being there, walking around the field behind our house.  I did not see him; I felt him as though he had returned to say good bye.

It has been nearly 20 years, and I still think about Pablo.  I can feel what it was like to have him sit close by me on our porch steps and to feel his thick fur against my check when I hugged him.  The scriptures are not clear about what happens to animals when they die, but Pablo was actually an innocent soul just doing what dogs are intended to do.  In my heart I cannot believe that Pablo's spirit or the spirit of any of our other dogs ends when they pass.  I don't claim to know everything, but I will always remember Pablo.  

Contraband

In case you haven't heard, the Food and Drug Administration announced this week that they are asking companies that produce food to voluntarily reduce the amount of salt added to processed food.  The second part of that story is that if companies do not reduce sodium in their products voluntarily, the FDA stands ready to  require the amount of salt to be reduced.  I guess the FDA has not heard about the boxes of salt available for sale on the bottom shelf in the spice aisle at Food City.

The FDA theorizes that if all of our processed food has steadily falling amounts of sodium, in a generation or two we will suddenly realize that, "Hey!  This can of soup tastes great!" even if there is only one grain of salt in it.  I tried some "healthy" soup as a lunch option once when I was still working.  It was the kind of soup that not only doesn't hurt your health, it fortifies your immunity and enables the consumer to re-grow diseased organs.  I took one taste and gagged.  I think the main ingredient (chicken?  beans?  lettuce?  it was hard to tell) was not something found in nature.  It smelled so bad that I threw it in the trash can in the hall way to keep the stink out of my office and went to the snack bar where I purchased a cheeseburger on a grilled bun.

Since ancient times salt has been a commodity that drives entire economies.  It was so important during the Civil War that battles were fought over salt production facilities.  Humans need salt to survive.

But now the FDA knows better. We cannot be trusted to cook our own food. When the time comes that the voluntary reduction procedures don't work, and the FDA must regulate the availability of salt to protect us all, the price of a pound of salt will be so expensive that Mexican gangs will sneak kilo-sized bundles of salt across the border and sell it in baggies to trembling chefs in dark alleys.

Will it come to the point that if you use a salt shaker, you're breaking the law?  That would make life at my house difficult.  We eat from the four food groups every day:  salt, fat, sugar, and caffeine.  I think that we would eat grilled possum liver if it had enough salt on it.

Apple-atcha

The roots of the branches of my family go deep in West Virginia.  Old Isaac Ballengee came to the banks of the Greenbrier and New Rivers in what is now West Virginia around 1782.  The Amicks left Pennsylvania and spent some time in Pendleton County before settling in Nicholas County around 1820 or so.  The Dorseys, Burdettes, Finks, and Boleys were all established in the Appalachian Mountains long before the western side of Virginia became a state in 1863.

Having been born and raised in West Virginia, I was astounded to find out all the things I did not know about Appalachian culture when I first attended Berea College, the supposed exemplar of everything Appalachian.  The faculty, while learned and scholarly, arrived in Berea from other places to teach Appalachian culture to the students who actually lived in Appalachia.  One of the more popularly known aspects of Appalachian culture taught at Berea was "country dancing".  A student group known, not surprisingly, as the Country Dancers, is quite well known and travels extensively to perform traditional dance sets.  I was intrigued by the Country Dancers and loved to watch their skillful performances, but part of the astonishment at the intricacies of their dances is that  I, who had roots in Appalachia for generations, had never seen anything like that.

I'm willing to consider explanations, such as the fact that country dancing stemmed from British traditions, and my families were mostly German, as were many that settled in Appalachia.  If you look up "contra dancing", another term used in connection with these traditional "Appalachian" dances, you will find that much of this dance tradition developed in New England, another explanation for why the average resident of Appalachia has no idea what country dancing is.  An unlikely rationale is that I didn't know squat about Appalachian culture, and the people who came to Berea from New England and other places understood more correctly the way we lived in the mountains.

Those who have lived in Appalachia for a long time know that it's pronounced "Apple-atcha" as in, "I'm going to throw an apple atcha."  Suspicions, as well as hackles, are raised when well-meaning folks say, "Appa-lay-cha".  I know they think they are literate, bless their hearts, but the Appalachian region is not like Boston, Mr. Robert Kennedy, Jr., and I think we know how to say the name of the place where we live.  People who like to protest the way we live should first educate themselves about how we use the language.

No matter which state they live in, the people in the Appalachian Mountains are bound together by history, religion, art, and food.  Residents of the Appalachian Region share so much that it isn't beyond reason to think that Appalachian people, gathered together from the various states, could make a 51st state.  People who come here from places like New England to protest on the steps of the capitol building in Charleston should first understand that fact.  Richmond, the capital of Virginia, you see, is not in Appalachia.

Flaming Buns

In cruising around the internet recently, I found a link to an article on how to write a blog.  I thought I needed to read it.  The article recommended finding a "niche" that was appealing to a specific audience.  One of the topics that many people apparently want to read about is cooking, and cooking was the only topic listed about which I know anything at all.

Sometime ago a friend of mine and I were discussing cheesecakes.  I told her about this great cheesecake recipe I'd made, and she said she didn't even own a spring form cake pan.  When I told her that I owned three different spring form cake pans, she said, "Oh!  You're a serious cook!"

I'm not certain that owning a cake pan makes me a serious cook.  Many years ago I asked my mother-in-law the secret of making good biscuits.  She told me, "You have to have a biscuit pan that's at least 25 years old."  I knew at that point that light, tender, fluffy biscuits were not in my near future.  My biscuit pan now meets the age requirement, and I have to say that my biscuits have improved with each year.  She knew what she was talking about.

From watching cooking shows I'm of the opinion that some people will eat just about anything.  I once watched Anthony Bourdain on the Travel Channel eat a cooked iguana in Mexico.  He said it made him want to stick his head in a bucket of lye.  I've had meals like that, too.  There are some foods that we will not eat at our house:  cumin, cilantro, snails, eel, steak tartare, and I will never cook a live lobster.  Nor an iguana.

When I'm faced with an exotic food dish, I often say that I'm not that hungry yet.  Like Scarlett O'Hara, I may find myself destitute and noshing on raw turnips in the garden, but so far I've been blessed with enough food to be able to choose what I actually like to eat.  I don't have any points to prove about my creativity when I'm cooking.  

By some people's standards, since I'm not willing to eat just any old thing that can be caught, skinned, and put in a pot, I'm not a serious cook.  I do have standards, though, and they include fried pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potato casserole, turkey and dressing, and fried squash.  

People who consider themselves serious cooks might question my standards.  At my house everyone knows supper is ready when the smoke alarm goes off.  I had only one witness, my daughter, when I was toasting some hamburger buns under the broiler in the oven.  We watched in anticipation, mouths watering for the juicy hamburgers, but when I pulled the buns from the oven, they were afire.  Yes, flames actually shot up from the buns, and I whipped the dish towel over them to snuff out the flames.

Part of my retirement duty is to cook supper every evening.  So far things have turned out pretty well with no major disasters (if you don't count the ham on Christmas Eve which got just a wee bit well done).  Each afternoon when I start into the kitchen to fix supper, I feel a little like Grandpa Jones on Hee Haw when he was asked, "What's for supper?"  He'd smile and list great fare like country ham, fried potatoes, collard greens, cornbread, and blackberry cobbler for dessert.  I'm not a serious cook; I just like to eat.

Grace at the Bird Feeder

I am not a doctor in real life, nor do I play one on TV.  That statement will make sense only to people who are older than, say, 40.  My diagnosis is that I've had the flu; a real doctor might say the diagnosis doesn't bear up under testing, but it sure feels like the flu.

Between the snow and being sick, I've mostly stayed in the house, tracking the number of times the blue light special flares up on the thermostat in the sub-zero temperatures.  That would be a sub-zero temperature for the high temperature of the day.  On Sunday we barely made it to 20 degrees.  One of the few things that will make me go outside is to fill the bird feeders, one in the front yard by the family room window and one in the back yard.  Things are so desperate for the birds that I put out old bread and cut-up apples for them to eat.

Keeping those feeders filled gets to be expensive, but we manage to re-stock the supply of seed from the local Wal-Mart.  On Larry's last trip to Wal-Mart a woman complained about the tenacity of the blue jays and how they run off the smaller birds.  Larry replied, "The blue jays are God's creatures, too, and they get just as hungry as the other birds do."  We don't stress because of the diversity at the feeder; there are even some crows who've showed up recently.  They don't stay long, but they do come to check out what's going on.  Our feeders are available to all who are hungry:  cardinals, chickadees, the yellow finches who are mostly brown in the winter, the red-headed finches, sparrows, woodpeckers, blue jays, crows.

The birds come to eat their fill without any thought of how much the food costs or how it got into the feeder.  They see that the food is there; they recognize it; and they come.  The branches are filled with birds, but none of them seem worried.

Neither is there anything that the birds have done that prompted us to start feeding them.  We feel a sense of compassion for them and companionship with them; that's the only motivation for us to drag 40 pound-bags of seed into the garage and empty them cup by cup into the feeders.  We recognize the ones who return day-by-day, and we feel some relationship with them in their struggle to find food in the winter, especially the ones who come to sit on the branches close to the window where they can look in at us.  Over the Christmas season one of the birds stayed each night in the wreath we had hung on the window.  Each evening we saw him fluttering around the wreath.  When we took it down, he looked for that comfy wreath each evening; it broke my heart that he had lost his home.

The feeders are not without risks, though.  They are also a prime feeding point for hawks, who have occasionally taken a smaller bird.  We try to watch for the hawks, and if we see one circling we dash outside and wave our arms to scare them off.  We feel "protective" about our birds.

So much of my time has been spent watching the birds at the feeder, I've come to see how it's modeled after the grace of God, who spends all of his time watching us and developing a relationship with us, if we will come close to him.  His grace is available to any and all who would accept it.  He doesn't favor the small, pretty ones anymore than the noisy, aggressive ones.  He loves all regardless of the markings of their feathers.

There is no cost to us to receive the saving grace of God.  The price is one that we cannot pay; the only one who could pay that price was Jesus, and he paid it with his own life.  Because of that sacrifice, the benevolence of God is free to us.  When we are threatened, God offers protection.  Jesus has already defeated death for us.  For me.  For you.

There isn't anything we've done to prompt the gifts that God provides for us.  He gives them freely and abundantly because He wants a continuing relationship with us;  he provides for us if we will only show up to meet him and receive the gifts he delivers.

So when warm weather returns, and the birds are in the trees outside my window trilling a fetching tune, I'll join in that song.

Down in Old Germantown

Snow again.  Well, what can we expect in January?  I'm watching it snow and wishing that those boots I ordered from L. L. Bean would come in because I really need them.  Stuck in the house with no boots:  this is a good time for telling stories. 

Anyone who knows my true heart knows that I'm addicted to genealogy which involves so many things that I love:  research, constructing charts and tables from information I find, history, old photos, dusty books in libraries, shadowy court houses, and stories to tell.  But every story seems to have a gap that needs to be filled up with some obtuse piece of information from a document that was recently discovered in a moldering box in the basement of a court house in a remote county three states away.  Genealogists are optimists; the record is there, somewhere.  I just haven't looked in the right place yet.

Fifteen years ago I knew the names of my dad's parents, his birth date, where they had lived, and that my grandmother had died when my father was a baby.  After sifting through a considerable amount of history, I documented some good stories about my Huguenot ancestor who came to America before it was a country.  Believe it or not, Red Ballengee, who grew up on Sourwood Mountain near Hix, West Virginia, was connected to the Germantown settlement in colonial Philadelphia.

Germantown was established in 1683 at the direction of William Penn, who had creative ideas about how the town should be laid out.  Instead of having a "commercial" district with merchants and businesses in the center of the town and farms surrounding the settlement, each resident had a plot of land in town that could be farmed.  Penn promoted religious tolerance which was a fresh idea at the time, even in territory that was populated by settlers who wanted to start anew because of religious persecution.  

Germantown took its name from Protestant German craftsmen who were recruited to live in Pennsylvania, and into Germantown in 1697 came Red Ballengee's ancestor, Evi Bellange, a Frenchman and a weaver by occupation.  "Evi" was an Anglicized version of the French name, Yves, and was often written in early records as "Eve".  I'm not precisely certain of Evi's origins, but he was a French Protestant, a Huguenot, who joined with the Quakers either during a sojourn in England or when he came to Virginia.  The first record of his residence in America was in Henrico County, Virginia, where he and his wife, Mary, purchased land, and he took on an apprentice in the weaving trade.

In early Virginia Quakers were persecuted because of their faith, and in some cases in the colonies, Quakers were hanged because they would not profess the Anglican faith.  But Evi was indeed a Quaker; his name is found in lists of witnesses to marriage ceremonies in Virginia.

Mary Bellange must have died in Virginia, because her name is not found in later records.  No records have been found to indicate that Evi and Mary had children, but Evi continued to live in swampy, muggy, bug-infested Henrico County.  Have you ever been to Richmond in the summer time?  

The Quakers of Phildelphia visited those in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, portraying the idyllic life in Pennsylvania where tolerance of differing religious views was not only accepted, but encouraged.  I imagine that, to Evi, living in a temperate climate where farmland was fertile, life was peaceful, and business opportunities abounded sounded good.  If he and Mary had children, perhaps they had grown up by that time (he'd lived in Virginia 17 years).  He was at least 37 years old or so about then, maybe a little older.  

Whatever the reasons, Evi was thinking of moving on, so near the end of the 17th century, he took up the offer from the Philadelphia Quakers and found himself on the road to Pennsylvania.  I imagine that he lived with other Quakers until he was established in Germantown, but I don't know the details of how he got started with his business and his new life; I expect that he did well selling the fabrics of muted colors to his fellow Quakers.  I do know that before long a young Quaker woman caught his eye and his heart.

Men and women do not even enter a Quaker meetinghouse in the same door; they have separate entrances, so I think that Evi's courtship of Christian De LaPlaine, of the New York De LaPlaines, was quite staid.  Evi had to present a certificate from the Quakers in Virginia, and he was questioned as to the completeness of his religious thinking.  Only after that were he and Christian allowed to pursue an engagement.  They presented their intentions to marry three times at the Quaker meeting, and in September 1697 they were married, not by a priest or a preacher, but by standing together at the meeting and declaring their marriage vows before God.  

Before the marriage in May 1697 Evi bought 50 acres from John Luken, one of the original settlers in Germantown, possibly thinking that he needed a place where he could settle down.  The property consisted of 20 acres in the inhabited part of Germantown and over 29 acres in the side land.  In modern Germantown this lot is near the corner of East Penn Street and Germantown Avenue and is the location of a newspaper, The Germantown Chronicle.  The Clarkson-Watson house stands there now, but that has nothing to do with Evi Bellange. 

The original buildings in Germantown were log houses, but those came to be replaced by houses built of native stone.  It had been 14 years since the beginning of Germantown, so I'm sure there were improvements of some kind on the property when Evi bought it. 

So this is how Evi and Christian began their life together in old Germantown, a great distance from the mountains of West Virginia where the threads of their story were picked up a hundred years later.