Mountain Voices, Mountain Days
The old farmhouse stands bleached and weary in empty fields. Once, not long ago, there were cattle and crops, but now the corncrib sags and the fences are broken, and only cricket song edges the stillness on the West Virginia hilltop. Your clattering summons on the screen door seems a harsh intrusion on a long, slow dream of the past.
Oda Bell Blankenship lives here. She is 82, bent with arthritis, spare and weathered as a fence rail. She makes quilts that are works of art - bold, random shapes of bright cloth, linked with intricate stitches and wreathed with blossoms of gay yarn.
"Flower gardens, I call 'em. Always seemed like you could sleep better under a pretty quilt. The first of these stitches I ever seen, I was 8 years old. Took it up watchin' my mother. Pieced me a quilt for my dolls too, ol' rag dolls. Never had but two store-bought dolls in my whole life."
The worn, strong face is young for a moment. The past is alive in the small room with the old brass bed and the faded wedding portrait on the wall.
"I was married at 18. My husband, he saw the prettiest little ol' doll in the store, and he took his last dollar and bought it for me. I was still like a young 'un. We had ten children. Four of 'em is dead. We come here from Narrows, over in Virginia. Brought three milk cows and a horse and a mule. We raised purebred cattle. My son George, he did most of the tradin' and traffickin' after my husband died. But he took sick. The other boys had married off, 'cept one, and he didn't want to farm no more. The farm's really run down since we took the cattle off it.
"I liked it better when we first come, the medders all in bloom.
George is dead two years this fall. There's never been one like him, and it never will be."
Later, in the city, the package arrives and the quilt tumbles out, it's flowers a bright cash crop from a worn-out West Virginia farm. You are touched again by a life and a place that seem etched by light from another century.
Perhaps you are hungry for the past in a present that flickers uneasily like electronics on a screen.
Of course you go back.
Reprint from National Geographic, July 1972
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