I have said a thousand times it makes me sound like I came from a clan of cave bears or something.
As you well know I look to my ancestors a lot and try to envision what they worked so hard for so that future generations (me and mine) could have life better than they did.
I really feel the NEED to not let their hard works, efforts, values and morals go to waste.
I guess if I did not feel that MINE reflected all of THEIRS I would not desire to uphold THEIRS so very much.
Today while mindlessly gulping up images from my Facebook news feed I stumbled across one image that stopped me in my ancestral coal tracks.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Time-Travelers-come-travel-back-in-time/284477301577152
My Kentucky families came from farming, tobacco fields, moon shining, and coal mining.
Pretty typical when you talk about the 1700's to the 1950's.
My father's parents and grand parents basically told him to get his young 15 year old rump away from all the rough life "back in the hills" and make a new life in Connersville Indiana.
Dad's life has not been easy.
Dad's life has been much easier than that of HIS father (who died of TB when just in his 20's with a young wife, two boys- Uncle Robert and my dad, and aging parents to take care of.)
Dad's life has been much easier than that of HIS grandfather's (whose OWN father died when he was young and had to help HIS mother raise the other children.)
Dad has had quite a few modern factories to work in, modern warehouses, he even worked in a hospital.
Heck, in the 1950's, when dad came to Connersville Indiana the economy was so good that people were walking and shopping downtown from dawn till dusk three deep in the sidewalks.
That's the way folks around here tell it.
And by all the photos in the museum and history books it seems that IS the way it was.
Dad says that you could set out in the morning to get a job and by noon you could have FIVE!
I think Dad worked every job he could find so he could make money.
Times were rough growing up in the mountains of Kentucky, so he had the example of "HUSTLING your rear", or working hard as he would say.
Every thing Dad has provided for his entire family has been much better than he had it or the generations before had it.
Dad also made sacrifices for his family that enhanced OUR lives, but perhaps did not provide for his own person aspirations like he first thought it would
He wanted to go to the Air Force.
He was too young and wanted his mother to sign papers - she would NOT!
(THANK YOU GRANNIE KATIE.)
If she had, then Dad would not have stuck around and met Mom.
He would not have seen her black hair and dark cat eyed glasses and beautiful 1950's curves in a skirt and totally change his mind about going any where that she was NOT!
I am very thankful for all of this because I am the very LAST child they had!
I waited on the side lines for QUITE awhile till it was my turn at bat!
Maybe that is WHY I am thankful for all the serendipitous events that led up to my life.
When I was a teenager I asked my Dad why he never went back, like many did, to Jackson County and build a house on his share of the land.
"I just wanted better for my wife and kids, honey."
Dad never wants to put anyone or their way of life down, so it was hard to get more out of him than that ....until I was old enough to ask more pointed questions.
I learned to ask questions in a way where he could just tell it like it was, not having to make a statement that would pass judgement.
He, too, likes to be reverent to the efforts that were made for him.
Basically his answers summed up to this:
While he loved his family very much and they were the closest things to Heaven he thought he would ever find on this side, he realized that there were things about that life he just refused to have in OUR lives.
NO moon shining and running!
NO coal mining life and death and diseases and enslavement.
NO tobacco field dreams to be dashed with pests and floods.
NO rocky top mountain poverty farming.
Not all areas there in Jackson county offered this type of life, some were better, some were worse.
BUT, these were the choices offered to my father and he said "No thank you. I will make mine up here in Indiana."
He sacrificed life with the family he knew that was left in Kentucky for life with family that went on to Indiana.
He sacrificed life there to have a new family here.
MY LIFE was a paradise on our little farm in southwestern Fayette County Indiana, thanks to BOTH Mom and Dad.
Where I learned to run bare foot in the grass and gravel alike and wash my hair in the creek with my big sister!
I have to also thank my older siblings.
They worked harder than most of their friends in the 1960's and 1970's on our farm, but still we had it better than earlier generations.
We had electricity, running hot and cold water, we had an indoor toilet (which believe it or not you I-phone using techie junkies most folks in rural Indiana did NOT have until into the 1960's!), a telephone (with party line- EVERY nosey little sister's dream!), nice clean electric heat (in the newly added bedrooms), lush vegetable gardens and wild berries, apples and other fruit growing on 65 acres, I don't recall how many head of cattle (enough to be called a herd!), pigs, chickens, wild game, and T.V. (WHEN you could go outside and turn that monster sized aerial antenna pole - AND when Channel 4 Indianapolis decided to have good enough signal to reach all the way out here in eastern Indiana!)
Dad had a rattle trap farm truck that would take us down dusty roads in the summer time to get a Chocola or Charms Blow Pop!
That same truck would scream all the way to the Nulltown Store
or Jim Lakes Grocery in Everton in the winter time for some treat as Dad stopped to get a plug of tobacco.
Yep, my childhood was a paradise.
I have all who came before me to thank.
