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    Bright-Eyed and Barefoot: Stories of an Appalachian Girl
    Bright-Eyed and Barefoot: Stories of an Appalachian Girl
    Bright-Eyed and Barefoot: Stories of an Appalachian Girl
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Bright-Eyed and Barefoot: Stories of an Appalachian Girl

    By Christy Wolfe

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    About this ebook

    Bright-Eyed and Barefoot is a humorous and touching memoir of growing up with little money and even less adult supervision. These stories show the independence, creativity, and resilience of an Appalachian girl, and her siblings and friends, who were charged with looking out for her. At a time when American working parents, living both in small towns and down country roads, were transfixed by world events and economics, their children–like Christy–were busy decorating bicycle banana seats and jumping off ropes into swimming holes.

     

    Bright-Eyed and Barefoot shares funny and tender memories of hiding in cattle pens, spinning 45s, watching car races, riding horses, and climbing trees; as well as other tales of growing up in the 1970s and 1980s between the Ohio River and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Each story, organized by theme, shares insight into the culture of people at a place and time that can be revisited only through the memories of those who lived it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCreek Water Press
    Release dateSep 11, 2020
    ISBN9781393340171
    Bright-Eyed and Barefoot: Stories of an Appalachian Girl
    Author

    Christy Wolfe

    Christy Wolfe is the daughter of a small town valedictorian and working mom, who had three children without the benefit of maternity leave; the daughter of a farm boy and small business owner, who dropped out of high school and faked his age to join the workforce; and granddaughter to a quintessential homemaker, a deep-pit coal miner, and mule-plowing farmers. She grew up, despite it all.

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      Book preview

      Bright-Eyed and Barefoot - Christy Wolfe

      Chapter One

      Slaughterhouse

      If you call the first phone number that I ever memorized, it rings at a slaughterhouse. It always has. The years before my seventh birthday, it was the emergency number for me and my siblings when my parents were at work. We lived across the road next to a recreational fishing lake in a Jenny Lynn-style rental. The house itself screamed Appalachia with its dark brown board-and-batten siding, reminiscent of its coal-town shanty namesake, and a front porch set up to greet neighbors. The porch was famous for being once rammed by a car whose driver fell asleep at the wheel and missed the curve just before our driveway. On the west side of the house stood a sandstone stacked chimney next to a screened porch perfect for creating a house for butterflies, moths, lightning bugs, and the occasional praying mantis. In a picturesque setting like this you can’t wait for trouble to find you, you’ve got to find trouble. And no one was more willing to help out than my brother, just eighteen-months older than me.

      The lake was off limits to a point. We were forbidden to go in the lake, which offered some amount of interpretation for children under age nine. This is exactly why parents will drone on with specific examples such as don’t swim in it, wade in it, wash your hands in it, dip your toe in it, or even pee in it! But my parents were raising independent, free thinkers so they left it at don’t go in the lake. The problem with enforcing this mandate was that our older sister had run off every babysitter within a ten-mile radius. Our parents could not take one more call at work from babysitters recounting the injustices my pre-teen sister had subjected them to during their stay, which left us largely free of adult supervision during the summers.

      A small forest stood behind our house. A cluster of trees lined a ravine where the water flowed in from the lake making it perfect for growing a thicket. My brother and I would slip along the lake and into the woods away from watchful eyes as if we were shiners dodging the po-po. Our explorations were fairly harmless and mostly consisted of hunting leaves, flowers, and wildlife. I had an extensive collection of flora pressed tight within the pages of both my Merriam-Webster dictionary and my Bible.

      Testing the limits of what one might consider the lake, we’d sometimes wade barefoot into marshy areas of the ravine being sure to keep our pants and shorts pulled up high out of the mud. We didn’t want to get caught red-legged. Tadpole hunting was almost a competitive sport among the local kids and we enjoyed bragging rights. While we had no shortage of fish aquariums in our house, we still enjoyed catching tadpoles and keeping them in fishbowls to watch their tails disappear as they grew legs and became frogs. Imagine our surprise when we ended up confronting a reptile in a quarrel over this prize.

      Its skin was rough and its tail had sharp ridges running along its length. It stared at us with beady eyes that sat just over beak-like jaws. Then suddenly it bumped my brother’s leg. This sent us screaming and splashing as we skedaddled out of the marsh before it could lock onto us. We had escaped victorious in our encounter with a snapping turtle. Our tale would have made us famous across half the county. Yet we were sworn to sibling secrecy, since we couldn’t tell anyone of our close call for fear that our confessor might interpret this marshy thicket as part of the lake. 

      Besides exploring along the banks, we also liked to fish in the lake. We had a couple of cane poles and would sit on the dock fashioned out of old railroad ties that sat nearest our house. I don't recall catching anything other than a bluegill or a sunfish, but we enjoyed stringing the hooks, bobbers, and sinkers and perfecting our knots.

      We didn't plan to keep any fish. When we caught one, we'd carefully back the hook out of the fish's mouth and set it free again in the lake. It was so exciting to watch the bobber bounce when the fish would bite, making circles of ripples in the water. Once I grabbed so fast for my rod that a three-inch long splinter from the dock ran up the palm of my hand. I had impaled myself in a fishing accident. This was an Alice emergency.

      Since we were already halfway to the slaughterhouse, there was no need to run home to call. We headed straight for Alice. Besides owning and managing the slaughterhouse, Alice could treat a number of medical emergencies including fevers, stomachaches, cuts requiring stitches, and even removal of a splinter the size of a chopstick from the palm of your hand, which she did without ceremony or a billing department.

      Our yard and the surrounding area were fun to explore, but the property around the slaughterhouse provided true adventure. Just past the turn into the slaughterhouse parking area, a gravel lane went up the hill to a small dump. On our way to the dump we would check out the ponds. They were oblong in shape making them seem as if they had once been part of nearby Mill Creek, but later cut off from it. Oddly the ponds were home to gigantic goldfish. Someone must have won them at the county fair and tossed them in the pond, where they had become jumbo size. They had unique markings that we'd seen on some of our sister's fish, so we knew they were definitely goldfish. Nowadays city folk like to call them koi and make special man-made ponds for them. For us, they were something to inspect on our way to find material rewards.

      The dump was a treasure trove to all three of us kids. Certain days were more favorable for finding things worth keeping because it was essentially a small transfer station. Sometimes we saw people drive cars up to drop off things that they didn't want anymore. We did a lot more window shopping than making actual acquisitions. We walked miles of circles around the junk heap seeing if anything looked worth salvaging. We didn't venture too far up the pile unless something looked particularly promising and an official dare had been made. If we did find something, we'd take it home to show it off.

      Our parents frowned upon our visits to the dump. They made the best day to score―the day things arrived―completely off limits for our visits. Then mom and dad went so far as to come up with elaborate tales of danger: We might get run over by a truck, stolen by bandits, or tetanus from a rogue nail. They also spent a great deal of time convincing us that big black rats―the size of the squirrels that we liked to watch skip up and down the trash heap―were inside the heap crawling all over the bounty. Then they suggested we play in the yard.

      The yard wasn’t awful. It had its own value. My mom had a twenty-six-inch women's bike that I liked to ride. I’d mastered it at age four. I was too short to sit on the seat but could stand up to work the pedals. It was one of those days when my mom asked what we’d been up to that day, I got to answer nonchalantly, Oh, we played in the yard and I learned to ride your bike. My brother and sister had bicycles also, so we’d ride up and down the driveway and through the yard. In the evenings we enjoyed chasing lightning bugs and collecting them in Mason jars. We just had to be careful when running barefoot through the yard after them to not step on any lit cigarette butts that dad had just flicked into the grass. Doing so would send us screaming and cursing.

      One of the most exciting things in the yard was a hole. It had probably been where a tree had stood and the stump removed, but we referred to it as the Devil’s Hole. We knew that the Devil had nothing to do with it. We actually had long debates while standing over the hole, discussing how far it was to China. At times we were firmly convinced that we could dig our way there. At other times we wondered what would happen to our spoons once we came close to the molten lava layer. Our favorite Devil’s Hole game required all three of us and sometimes friends. We would skip in a circle around the hole singing songs and when we’d reach

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