Memories of My Granny

A couple of things today inspired me to write this, one being it is the holiday season and the second being I have read a couple of books the last week that got me thinking about my own childhood, and it gave me some fond recollections I just had to share.   My great-grandmother, Ottie Turner, has been gone from this world now for about 26 years, being she reposed in 1985.  As she had a great influence on my life when I was growing up, and in a lot of ways I carry on a lot of her legacy myself, she is an important person to me that I love and truly miss at times.  Although I know that she was only human and not by any means a perfect person, I think of her as a saint, because to me that was who she was.  And, I want to share some of those memories with you now.

Back when I came into the world in the little town of Parsons, WV, back in 1969, the first place I ever lived when I went home from the hospital was Granny's in the nearby town of Hendricks.  She lived in this big house down by the Black Fork River next to an old swinging bridge that was there forever, and as a youngster that house became the center of my universe growing up.   I still remember smells I associated with the old homeplace - blueberries and lilacs come to mind, except in Granny's bedroom off the living room, which smelled like Easter candy.   It was a beautiful house, a sanctuary, and from the time I was born up until I was around 8 years old we called that place home a lot.  Unfortunately, in the Flood of 1985, it was wiped away and no longer stands there, and the picture below shows what happened to the house during the flood:

Granny's house was at the right of the picture.

Over the years, I have tried to bring a little piece of that old house to my own places I have lived, but it can never be the same exactly - Granny's was a unique house, but it does live in my memories and always will.  I do dream about it on occasion, and those dreams provide a nice visit, but I do miss the place.  And, I miss my Granny too - she was a wonderful lady.

Granny's roots began up in an area just north of Parsons called Holly Meadows, which was at the edge of a beautiful region in central Tucker County called the Sugarlands.  A couple of centuries back, a number of German Dunkard families settled that area, seeing the great potential for agriculture due to the rich bounty of the Cheat and Blackwater Rivers that border it, and among those were two families, the Stevens and the Helmicks.  Sometime in the late 1880's, a young Dunkard farmer named David Stevens married a young Dunkard girl named Antoinette, or "Nettie," Helmick, and they started a life together eventually having four children.  Granny was one of the youngest, being born in 1902, and she later married young when a 40-ish Dunkard preacher by the name of Charles Judson Strahin proposed to her when she was about 17 or so.   She ended up having four sons with him (the oldest, Walter, died in childbirth), and their second son, my grandfather David Frederick Strahin, is my grandfather who was born in 1925.   My great-grandfather Charles later died in 1932 of complications from black lung disease, and Granny soon after remarried her second husband, Delbert "Mose" Turner, with whom she had five additional children.  Her life was full but often hard - she was a young preacher's widow, and later had a bad end to her second marriage, and later she worked at the local hospital where she walked the three miles from Hendricks to Parsons every day for years until constant bouts of colitis soon forced her to retire.  But, she also was a woman of great faith - she never missed church on Sunday unless she was sick, always prayed at night before falling to sleep, and knew her Bible well.   That, along with a great gift for cooking and maintaining a wonderful house meant that life rarely slowed for her.  And, that is a legacy that lives after her today.



The Sugarlands in Tucker County, the home of Granny's folks.

My memories of Granny at this point are very personal.  I recall for instance her eating a bowl of Fruit Loops with me every morning when I was about six, and although she could cook some delicious breakfasts (fresh sausage patties and large, thick lean strips of bacon were often on the table), she enjoyed doing that with me.   However, her favorite thing was this stuff which in German was called Kopfkase (literally "head cheese," and the imagination goes far with that!) but the Americanized market version of it was called scrapple.  For those of you not familiar with Penn-German cuisine, scrapple is this square of grey jelly-like stuff made from boiled pig parts, corn meal, and seasonings (in the old days, it was also made from boiling a pig's head, hence the name kopfkase!), and the way it is typically prepared is sliced into squares and fried - it resembled a grey cheese.   I never really had the taste for it, as it just looked too weird, but Granny could live on it had she been able to. 



Scrapple, or Kopfkase (sometimes called panhase by the Mennonites).

Another little habit that crept into our family from our Penn-German Dunkard roots that my grandmother had a lot to do with was the use of certain names, either as terms of endearment or names said in anger if one of our parents or grandparents got a little ticked off at us.  One I remember well was GabeScheiss which I could never find a literal meaning of, but generally it had a connection to someone being a goofball.   Another one of these terms was Dumkopf which of course means "dumb head," and could be used as a term of endearment or exasperation, depending on the context of the situation.   Yet another was Machschnitz with "schnitz" referring to apple and rotten, meaning a spoiled brat basically.   Granny and her folks passed stuff like this down through the generations, and today I still call our cats those names when I get exasperated at them.  

Often, when I was little and we stayed with Granny too, I remember often getting to sleep in her bed at night, especially when it was cold out.  One ritual she always had was heating up this old antique iron (which actually was black iron) on the coal stove in the living room, then wrapping it in a towel and putting it at the foot of the bed.  It was an old practice of keeping the bed warm at night, and worked well during our cold winters.  And, she always said her prayers before bed too - she would kneel next to the bed and pray for everyone in the family, as well as for neighborhood people who had sickness or whatever, and I remember always lying there whispering to her, "don't forget me too, Granny!" - she never did either.  And, she also made sure - as did Mom - that I went to Sunday School.  After my great-grandfather passed in the '30's, Granny attended the Free Methodist church there in Hendricks, which was up the street from the house, and we often walked there on Sundays.  Although the church my great-grandfather built was in nearby Rosendorf - it has been home to the Pentecostal Church of God congregation since the 1930's - she chose to attend the Free Methodist parish because of its close proximity.  Her family's church though was up in the Sugarlands, an old Dunkard church that still stands and meets today and where the reunions of her mother's family, the Helmicks, are held every year still as they have been for decades.   Granny was a woman of strong convictions and beliefs, and Mom often pays me a high compliment by saying that I remind her of Granny with my own convictions.  Hearing that gives me a sense of great pride and awe, because to carry on my Granny's legacy in that way is a great responsibility, and for Mom to say that means something significant.   I only hope that when I see her in heaven one day, Granny can say the same thing. 

Although a sweet and compassionate lady of great conviction, Granny was also someone who didn't take a lot of nonsense either.  She was a little lady, but she also commanded great respect, and we did well to make sure she got it.  I remember crossing that line with her once when I was seven years old, and although I was not supposed to be down near the river - I couldn't swim, plus there were deadly snakes in the area - I ran off down there anyway.  Within a short time, here came Granny with a spatula, and she gave me a tanning on my rear I wouldn't soon forget!  Of course, at the age of seven, I often had my own names for stuff, and instead of spatula I called it a "skillet spoon," and to this day my family still loves telling stories about me and that "skillet spoon!" 

I also can remember the Sunday drives Mom took me and Granny on, as well as the yearly expeditions to pick the berries Granny turned into delicious cobblers, preserves, pies, and other goods.  Granny's favorite spot to pick huckleberries was up in the Stoney River region above Thomas, where the berries grew thick and plentiful in those days.  I of course loved helping, and berry-picking was a family affair for us all.  She also loved picking blackberries and red mountain raspberries up in Shaver's Fork, an area out on a dirt road just south of Parsons.   For about a week after the house smelled of berries as Granny canned and baked stuff with them.   Today many of those places where the berries were plentiful are no longer there, and not many people take foraging berries as seriously as the older generations did - many of them did it to survive, and as a result our forebears always ate well even when money was scarce.   It was Granny also that taught generations of our family to make candy out of potatoes at Christmas, gravy out of tomatoes in the summer, and fried cucumber slices, among other good stuff.   She also had home remedies that I still use to this day - she knew that whiskey and sugar water would knock out a cold, mint would cure a stomach ache, and the juice of fried onions would calm a teething baby's gums.  That wisdom is valuable, but it again is what the older folks needed to survive the harsh Appalachian winters.   When I think of how much I really learned from Granny, it is amazing, and the world is a poorer place today without people like her in it anymore.   And, mostly because of her, today blueberries are still my favorite fruit and lilacs my favorite flower - they evoke such good memories.

Much more could be said about Granny's legacy, but time and space do not permit.  However, I am glad to share it with you, and hope this will maybe get you thinking about your own folks.   I wish you all a happy holiday season, and until next time stay safe and take care.