Out of the Hills

My earliest memory and the most iconic image of my first year in existence don’t coincide. Of course, this is not surprising since I was only about two for the former and less than a year old in the latter. Regardless, both speak volumes about where I come from and perhaps also much about where I got to. The memory and photograph shared a common place, a small, four room clapboard house tucked between two hills in a remote area of Jackson County in Southern Ohio. Let me explain remote. The nearest paved road was State Route 35, some 20 miles away. While we did have electricity, water came from a well back behind the house and an outhouse was positioned somewhere back there, but my memory doesn’t reach that far.
As to that earliest memory, it is one I cherish and has become a place of comfort I go to often. It is sparse like so many memories from our earliest years. I am standing on a kitchen chair by the stove watching mom cook. I can’t tell you if it was breakfast, lunch or dinner. I do know it wasn’t a wood stove and electric stoves were rare, so it must have been gas. Not natural gas with lines running underground, but bottled gas as we called it – propane. So, I am standing there, mom is cooking, my older brother Jeff is somewhere in the picture. I can still almost smell those rich, heavy aromas from the iron skillet. It might have been pork chops, my dad’s favorite, or maybe fried potatoes. Whatever it was, it left such an impression that, 55+ years later I can still remember. That isn’t the only impression made at the kitchen stove. Once, perhaps the occasion of my memory or another time, my curiosity brought me too close to the skillet and my belly touched the pouring lip of hot iron, leaving a perfect rectangular square with rounded edges. That scar stayed with me through my young adult years and perhaps is why this early memory never left me.
Now to the image. It is one I really wasn’t aware of until many years after mom was gone, dad too. The photo is of mom, Brother Jeff, and myself out back of the house. Mom is holding me up as I am not quite walking yet and Jeff is looking off to the side. Mom is in a skirt and blouse, bobby socks with her hair done up nice. Even though the photograph is in black and white, you can tell the whitewash on the house is faded. The window behind mom is a simple wooden sash that probably kept little of the winter cold from seeping in. It is the kind of picture you could drop in to a Dorothea Lang collection of Dust Bowl photographs and it would not look out of place. 
My father was a lumberjack when we lived in that house. He and his younger brother Jim, and sometimes grandpa Holbrook would work the steep hillsides around us. Dad and uncle usually wielded the chain saws, grandpa working the mules to pull the giant trees down to level ground where they would be loaded on trucks to be turned in to paper at the mill to the north in Chillicothe. I honestly don’t remember dad coming home smelling of sawdust and gasoline. I was just too young. However, deeply imbedded in me is the presence of my mother in those first years. That presence never left as I and my siblings grew, attended school and headed toward adulthood.

I am thankful for her presence, but saddened by her leaving us all-too-soon. 19 years is not nearly enough time to have a mother. I am now at the point where I have lived two thirds of my life without her. The years don’t make the missing any less. Happy birthday mom.