The Russian Orthodox Slovenian bible I rescued from my Hungarian grandmother's house is falling from my book shelf, disgorging a few fragile pages. The Bible was found a few years after her death in a closet in her Southern West Virginia home. I was completely floored by the find, as I'd know my grandmother as a devout Methodist.
My cousin had lived in the house for a few years after Mamaw's passing, but all the accumulation of a four son family and a Depression era couple's small town civic life was still piled in the closets. Boxes of cards, photos, paintings, notes to self, newspaper clippings. Awards in frames. Hats. Hat boxes. A list of hats. Costume jewelry.
The house was built by my grandfather and his first and second sons. One of a brood of 12, did Papaw feel blessed with his college education and his house in town? Three bedroom, dining room, large kitchen, walking distance to the school.
The town house must've been a real step up from the house in McCraes, even though they had just renamed the tiny country enclave for the family's Civil-War-era patriarch. My one drive through the community formerly known as Tipple had shown me a collection of small houses along a twisty dirt road.
Mamaw was an avid newpaper reader who clipped stories, made notes on them and gave them to the people she thought they applied to. Her life was spent between her large eat-in kitchen with a red formica table, the school, the post office, the church, the trade school where they had the beauty salon, the garden, Mrs. Cooks house. Her red oval table was piled high with newspapers and correspondence, in fact her end of the kitchen table where the family ate daily was a little office, with stashes of bundled letters, rubber banded together. Notes, lists, phone numbers were left on the kitchen table and Frigidaire. I've inherited this proclivity for the gathering of facts and their re-packaging and re-distribution.
My own pictures and correspondences are collected in boxes, on shelves in the basement. Mamaw's pictures, rescued from the Kentucky side house, her cards, her college yearbooks... are all added to my collections. The life archive of my grandparents. If the images were photographed or scanned, the collection could probably be reduced a single CD. But of all the costume jewelery, hats, Boy Scout memorobilia, and correspondence, my favorite is a manila folder from a concern in Ohio, a piece of ephemera that sifted to the top of the pile, that contains a note as to Mamaw's whereabouts-- "Gone to Garden."
