One Generation After Another 6/16/2024

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

I come from good stock.  To call my people salt of the earth doesn’t seem a generous enough description. I come from the simplest of professions.  There were moonshiners and preachers.  There were steel mill workers and farmers.  Acres of picked cotton and fields of harvested peanuts are the stuff of which my people are made.  I am not certain if it is Father’s Day that has me thinking of such things, but this is what is on my mind.  While my ancestry can be traced back to castles, or the ruins thereof, and guardians of the King of England, there were those who weren’t much of anything, or at least not anything that I’d want to admit to here. I come from a family made of many siblings and enough cousins to choke a mule.  As a lover of history, I am enamored by any tale of old, but my most heartfelt affection is for my own story.

I don’t even know what I want to tell you about my own history. My parents come from opposite environments.  My mother is from the Appalachian foothills from northeast Alabama. My father is from the excessively flat southeastern corner of the state filled with endless peanut plantings.  It’s appropriate considering their personalities are equally contradictory. My mother is a perfectionist. She wants things done immediately and to an exact and thorough standard. My father is more than happy to procrastinate as he feels so inclined and he enjoys employing the ideology of, as my husband likes to say, of “letting the loose end drag.”  It isn’t the most attractive of phrases, but it certainly paints a picture.  There are a massive number of ways in which my parents are vastly different.  But then, there are those ways in which they are the same. They know where priorities must be placed. They know that without faith that all else is for nought. They both love ferociously though very differently. One is structured and detailed the other is casual and come-what-may.  Together they have built a life that makes a scale that while weighing heavily on both sides, ends up balancing rather nicely. This is the home in which I grew up.

Further back there was a great deal of cotton picking. Both parents picked cotton growing up. That is just one aspect of their agriculturally based lives. There were always eggs to be gathered, cows to be milked and, at certain times of the year, animals to be harvested. Chickens, cows and pigs provided for big families. Big families tended to chickens, cows and pigs.  It was a cycle that provided for countless numbers in this part of the country. Humble provisions for a humble life.  But the scripture says that “He hath exalted the humble”. Interestingly enough, that is also the motto of the family I married into.  I suppose it is appropriate.  While we have been blessed far beyond any semblance of what we deserve, our lives are decadent compared to those from which we descended.  Indoor plumbing was a luxury for a long time for my parents.  The fact that I live in a house that has more bathrooms than the inhabitants says a great deal about progress.

Today I do not raise the creatures that provide my food. I occasionally have a garden. That just tends to end up being a venture in producing far more of one random vegetable than I can use.  It is a very far cry from those days when the greater part of each meal would be gathered from my own land.  I absolutely do not scrape up each meal from whatever my property produces. It is pretty much whatever my grocery store provides.

I don’t know if I please my ancestors or if they look down on me (if they are capable of such, considering I don’t exactly know the specifics of the afterlife) and think to themselves that I am soft and weak. Honestly, they probably would think such things and I don’t know that they would be inaccurate. I am blessed beyond all sense of normality. I have it far, far better than I deserve. But perhaps, if the many who have gone before me, grandmothers and grandfathers with countless greats added on, perhaps they would look at how ridiculously good I have it and smile. The stock from whence I came, if they saw where I was now, they couldn’t help but be pleased with how far their progeny has come.  Perhaps those that were castle dwellers would be mildly underwhelmed but, for the most part, our most humble ancestors would be pleased.  May I leave a legacy that would make those from the future happy with the life I’ve built.