Deep Creek - Chapter One

Granny died of lung cancer the spring of 1986. It’s actually kind of ironic—she lived in Central Kentucky—a hot tobacco state; growing up in rural Washington County, smack dab in the middle of the boundary with Mercer County. I remember Granny complaining about having to pay taxes in both counties.

“The government’s going to get you coming or going!”

I heard my Granny state this expletive so many times, and she always made it sound like the foulest curse words known to Man. I don’t think I ever remember Granny uttering an actual foul word—with the exception of the time she called my ex-mother-in-law “that whoring bitch from Cornishville!”—But, as Alzheimer’s disease began to claim more of her memory, the curse words became more frequent.

Harrodsburg—the home of Old Fort Harrod and a shrine to Daniel Boone—is the major city in Mercer County, and in addition to it's obvious tourist attractions, is also the home to acres and acres of rich, rolling farm land.

Granny was prim and proper, but by no means dainty. She was what you’d call “big-boned”; just like Aunt Birdie and me—Aunt Birdie is Granny’s oldest daughter. We were built like female football players; not really fat, but sturdy—pleasantly plump.
Considering she grew up in a tobacco culture, Granny never smoked, chewed or dipped a day in her life, yet the black hand of cancer claimed her at the end of her seventh decade. She knew for a long time that there was something wrong with her; she just didn’t want to go to the doctor and have him tell her she was really sick. So, she delayed treatment until there was no hope but a fool’s hope for survival.
This is her legacy—this is the special essence—and spirituality of the most wonderful woman I have ever known. She was a brave woman and she gave her family enough strength to deal with the end of her life. Some of us are still feeling the strength of Granny and some of us are just beginning to find the strength that Granny instilled in us.

By the end of her time, the whole family had settled into a nightly routine and rotation of caring for Granny. With her son in another state, she only had her two girls close to home. Some of us grandkids pitched in to help lessen the burden of the increasing care that our grandmother began to require.
My Aunt Birdie brought Granny home to live on the family farm. Birdie’s husband—Miller—is a carpenter, so he added a small separate apartment onto their house for Granny to putter around in, so she felt on her own, yet it was handy enough to be accessible to the rest of the house and instant help. If Granny were having a good day, she would clean her small apartment or work on mending we all left for her to do. She loved to work in her garden more than anything, so Miller built Granny her own garden around the perimeter of Aunt Birdie’s wildlife area.

Birdie Camden married Miller Rainey more than 25 years ago, after meeting at a wildlife retreat in Pineville, Kentucky during the early 70’s. Miller is a retired Fish and Wildlife officer—giving the government more than 50 years of service—fighting fires, maintaining forestry concerns, and developing expansion projects to allow for community growth, but maintain the native habitat. He serviced a seventeen county area around Central Kentucky, and in addition to day-to-day government operations, he gave lectures and workshops occasionally to stimulate “buzz” around the subject of reforestation. These intimate workshops were his passion; he had so much enthusiasm for teaching a country farmer how to manage their shrinking farm lands, but at the same time maintain the native wildlife—both vegetative and living.

Birdie loved birds—Cardinals, Chick-a-Dee, finches, woodpeckers, blue birds—all feathered friends were welcome to forage, nest and patrol the 125 acre farm that Granny and Papa worked. She was a really plain, mousy young lady growing up, and because of her flat affect, most people saw her as cold, unfeeling. What most people didn’t see was the way my aunt was transformed when she left the harsh reality of her ordinary life and entered the raw wilderness of the “back forty”. The back forty is what we have always called the controversial area of the farm that straddles Mercer and Washington county—75 acres on the former, 50 on the latter, thus causing Granny and Papa to have to pay the double tax for one piece of property.
When Birdie comes in sight of the back forty, her face begins to melt and years of reserved behavior crackles away, just like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Where once there was a plain, uninviting persona, now there is a beautiful miracle of God’s hand in this world. Facial muscles relax and a dime size dimple appears in her right check. Her eyes brighten and her soul takes a huge deep breath of genuine relaxation. It was this incredible creature that Miller met that summer in Pineville. Love at first sight? I’m not sure I really believe in that, but I guess Birdie and Miller are as close to that miracle as I’ll ever be.

So, on good days Granny would tinker in her garden—cutting bouquets of zinnias, cosmos, and sunflowers. Clip, clip, snip. . .Granny was apt at deadheading flowers and pruning dead or diseased branches. Gardening was her passion, just like nature workshops were Miller’s, and she embraced every aspect of this passion just like a lover attending a mate. Kitchen scraps were sorted from kitchen trash on a daily basis, and after the supper dishes were washed, Granny would make her last nightly patrol of the garden and deposit the potential fertilizer into the mounded compost heap near the south side of the garden. The south side always got full sun on a daily basis and Granny always said this would cook the compost faster so the wonderful new soil could be used quicker.

She gave individual attention to all the mundane tasks involved in gardening, but her favorite children in the garden were her dahlias.

“The dailies are going to be beautiful this year.”

This was a common theme every spring, as Granny would work the soil of her dahlia bed to a fluffy rich consistency that arboretums would be envious of. Every spring on the Monday after Easter, Granny would start to plant the dahlia tubers lovingly into the soil. She carefully excavated a hole, amended the backfill dirt with blood meal, and then tucked the fat swollen tubers into there warm cozy home for the summer.

Dahlias aren’t winter hardy in Deep Creek—the tubers will freeze and die if the ground temperature drops below 30 degrees—because the weather in Kentucky is just as unpredictable as the old saying “you can tell how bad the winter will be by the stripes on the wooly worms”. A common saying in Kentucky is if you don’t like the weather then just wait a day and it will change. I can remember a winter when we still had roses blooming on Christmas Eve, but I also remember the winter of 1977—there was so much snow, we were out of school from Christmas break until after Valentines’ day. At the tender age of 14, I didn’t realize the significance of the deep freeze, but as my own garden knowledge grows, I now know this meant that all perennials in too cold of a zone were frozen out, never to return.

So, just as the dahlias start going into the ground after Easter, Halloween is the hailing sign of harvest season. November first was the day Granny would begin the arduous task of digging her prized dahlia tubers. Just as she pampered the plants into the ground, she used the same tender care to lift the amazing root systems from the ground. She would leave the tubers lying on top of the soil for several days, allowing the sun to dry the membranes slightly and prevent rot during the winter. After the tubers were cured, they were packed away, in shallow layers, inside old wooden vegetable crates—sand and wood chips from Miller’s construction projects were packed around the tubers to provide insulation and constant temperatures.
Granny was a semi celebrity for many years in both Washington and Mercer counties. For 15 years, Granny was the grand prize winning at both county fairs for her marvelous dahlias. Her babies were so spoilt during the summer, us grandkids were almost jealous. Watering, staking, and primping . . .these were daily tasks, with more attention given to prizewinning contenders. Obvious prizewinning contenders were isolated down to one bloom per plant because this helped the remaining flower to grow bigger and healthier. The day before each county fair, Granny would be out in the garden before the dew dried, tying ribbons around blossoms she planned to enter in the competitions.

Because of the rural location of the county fairs, competition was always furious between die-hard dahlia growers. The contests were divided into categories for each certain types of plants, so in the dahlia category alone, there were 10 different categories. Largest and smallest were a given, but there was also classes for different colors, multiple blooms, and arrangements. The Best of Show was the dahlia that was the healthiest and most gorgeous overall the dahlias at the show. Granny was the Best of Show winner for so many years, there is now a sweepstakes named after her—the Ellie Myrtle Camden Award. This honor is awarded to the person who ends up with the most blue ribbons in the dahlia category.

As Granny’s disease progressed, she began to have difficulty breathing, especially when she would bend over to weed or work in the soil. So Miller built her some raised planter beds with seat edging all the way around. The beds were only four feet wide, so Granny could sit on any edge and reach the center of each bed. This was the summer I was pregnant with Dawn, my oldest daughter. I was huge and miserable, having gained 60 pounds—my brother said I looked like I was going to have a small calf! It really upset me then, but I’ve had my revenge because he, and his perfect wife, are now much larger in size than I am. Everybody has a little vain edge to his or her personality—mine has always been my weight.
Miller worked on the planter bed boxes in his barn the winter before, so when the first signs of spring arrived, we had a garden raising—kind of like a barn raising, only with dirt and plants. My mom, Aunt Birdie, and my uncle John from Pennsylvania all bought Granny dump truck loads of dirt for an early Mother’s day present. The day of the raising, Aunt Birdie fired up her outdoor grill and we slow cooked one of her young hogs on a spit over the coals. She had killed and drained the hog the day before, and by the time everyone arrived, the meat was skinned and already taken on a tan color from the coals, and frequent bastings with homemade apple cider. As we all labored happily on Granny’s new garden, the succulent smell of roasting pig keep us motivated to finish our tasks.

Once the men—Miller; my dad, Gene Sallee; my brother, Cecil; and my husband, Eddie—had the boxes secured into the ground in the exact locations that Granny pointed out, we women began the task of helping haul soil from the dump site near the front of the house, to the back yard where the garden was. That morning, I had grumbled about the cold 40 degree weather, but as I began to sweat and labor under the loads of soil, I stripped out of my double layer of sweats shirts, rolled up the sleeves to my denim button down, and silently praised God for the cool temperature.
By lunchtime, we were all starving, but Aunt Birdie only gave us cold bologna sandwiches with icy bottles of Pepsi-Cola.

“What about that hog out there? When do we eat that?” The men folk all grumble under their breath.

“You haven’t worked up an appetite yet! When the job is finished, that’s when we feast.” Aunt Birdie liked to prolong the anticipation as long as possible; although she may have sounded gruff, I had no doubt that the supper table would be laden down with so much food we would need our wheelbarrows just to roll ourselves to our cars. But not before a sense of accomplishment. The job had to be finished—and to her satisfaction.

By four o’clock the sun had started its downward spiral—there was still two hours of daylight left, but we had finished filling the planter beds and raking the soil smooth. Tomorrow we would help Granny to amend the soil with her fertilizer concoctions and compost. Within three weeks, she would start to plant her precious tubers. But for today, we had finished our task. The men were sent to the small summerhouse to shower and clean up—us women took turns with Aunt Birdie’s bathroom, while Granny used her own bathroom. As I predicated, by five, we were all seated around Birdie’s big harvest table, which creaked with heaviness each time a platter was added to the growing spread.

These types of activities occurred on a frequent basis; sometimes we would work on a project at my house, or my sister’s house, but we came together most often when it concerned Granny. The next summer, we all laid a flagstone path around garden to accommodate Granny’s growing need of her wheelchair. We dug a small pond that same winter, so Granny could listen to the nightly opera of frogs. The last two years of Granny’s life were filled with Saturday afternoon gatherings and Sunday dinners, everyone making a concentrated effort to see Granny several times a week. During the last year of her life, we were deeply devoted to our nightly companionship with Granny, working together to make sure she was never alone, and to help with the constant burden of her care.

Tuesday was my night—every Tuesday I left my loving husband and young pre-teen daughter, Nicole, to fend for themselves while I took my turn “sitting a spell” with my wonderful grandmother.

Some nights, Granny would be too tired to do anything more than lay in her bed and watch the television. Other nights she would be energetic enough to take a moonlight stroll in the garden. We would read, we played cards, we drew sketches of wildlife, and we bonded in a special way that will live in my heart for eternity. These are but a few of the loving memories of an amazing lady.

© Bobbi Rightmyer