My Poet's Hat

Since I attended the Gathering of Writers at Greenbo, I have been writing poetry. Before I went I would have said "I'm trying to write poetry". Now I feel confident that I can write poetry because I've been reading a lot of it and I like mine just fine. I really like the re-discovered fact that it doesn't have to rhyme!!!!!!!

Here's my happy poem for today.

Summer Feet
the grass is cool as we run through sprinklers watching for bees in clover squealing with delight as wet hair falls into our eyes blinding us with joy * steam rises from the black top as we dance in line waiting for a frozen treat from the small white truck while “Pop Goes the Weasel” sings along * the rocks are sharp as we hold our arms out wide to help balance as we wobble across the alley to jump into a three foot pool of cold, fresh water * the mud is cool between our toes slurping as we pull out feet splashing each with no regard to false protest * the wash rag tickles as it roughly rubs to remove mud and dirt and sand from feet, callused by summer and ready for bed

Fountain Square

I'm still hot from performing on Fountain Square today. No, not hot as in uh la la but as in its freaking hot and I'm sweating. I sang with as much of a smile as I could muster but I was melting.

As usual, Roberta, Violet and Vicky of Raison D'etre performed twice as long as I did and they didn't look in the least bit uncomfortable. They are my heroes. To love what you do so much that you make it comfortable for the audience. Awesome.

Roberta joined me for three songs so she actually performed for more than an hour. What a wonderful musician she is.

The Homestead - Part Two

The Homestead - Part Two

Aunt Sheila lived with Grandma and Grandpa at the old house. She was called deaf and dumb but I knew she wasn’t. She couldn’t hear but she was as smart as any of us. Because I lived with Grandma from time to time I got to go the movies with Sheila. Translating in our own homemade sign language I would tell her what Elvis was up to, as if she didn’t know just from his moves, his glances and his lovely blond co-stars. She loved Elvis.

Mom and Grandma in front of her house. The red brick row houses across the street are now the parking lot for Newport on the Levee

When I was older, Sheila and I would take the #8 bus to Dayton, straight east, to Tacoma Pool where I, like a feisty Chihuahua, was given the task of keeping the boys away from her. Sheila was attractive with her pretty blond curls, brown eyes and big smile. Not being able to hear or talk, Grandma was afraid someone would take advantage.
At night Sheila was up late she’d pull the box of Hershey cocoa from the shelf and I would find the sugar. In the wee hours between the movies we would make homemade fudge or pop corn that we’d cover with melted butter.

My daughters on their bikes in Grandma’s yard. Even as a mother I moved back from time to time.

When I graduated from high school I moved back in with my grandparents to help my grandma with my grandpa, who had had a stroke. He was 88 years old and like many in his condition, he wanted to go home. We didn’t know where that home was because they had lived in this house for almost 50 years. One very cold night in late February grandma, my cousin Carlene and I woke to moans. We searched the house for grandpa, even the dark, scary basement. He was no where to be found but his moans continued. He did not have enough strength to open the heavy front door, swollen with age it was usually stuck and everyone just came in the back. The last place was outside, though, and when we forced the heavy door open, we found grandpa on the snowy ground, near the dreaded forsythia bush. He survived just a few more days, still wanting to go home, having gained enough strength to open the door that we barely could handle.
When grandma grew older and the house was her’s alone, it became too big and the steps too high and narrow. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. She lived with my mom for a few years, in an apartment upstairs from Aunt Sheila and her husband and her daughter. It was convenient but it wasn’t home. It wasn’t the home where she could spend time in her yard, watering the grass and raising dandelions. It wasn’t the front porch where she could watch the traffic taking the sharp curve onto Route 8. It wasn’t the homestead where the family came to watch the fireworks or celebrate a holiday.
When I was a young mother living far away, Grandma would come to visit. On quiet nights she would tell me stories of her house. Before the floodwall was built they had a view of the water and only had to cross Front Street to enjoy the riverbank. She told me of carnivals and circuses that would set up just walking distance from her front door. She told me that in the 1937 flood she and the family crawled out of the attic window into a rowboat. They had waited until the water was very high, not wanting to leave what they had behind. Trying to save it by moving it all to the second floor, it still was ruined when the flood came up as far as the roof. When my husband and I stripped wallpaper to panel the second floor, you would see daylight where the boards had disintegrated from the flood waters. The slant of the house made the work difficult and the finished project a bit askew.
Grandma told me that during the depression Grandpa would go to the river boats and buy fish. We would then walk dozens of miles through Ft. Thomas and Highland Heights selling it, just to put food on the table.
Now our homestead has been replaced with six stories of shiny metal and glass. It has a commanding view across the floodwall and where the dusty basement stood, is a clean, concrete parking garage. I drive past whenever possible, remembering the days and lives that we enjoyed at the homestead. No one ever took a photo of the front of grandma’s house but I can see it in my heart.

My cousin Barb, my daughers and my grandmother under the shade tree in the back yard.

Our Homestead - Part One

While I was at the Seedtime Festival of the Cumberlands in Whitesburg, Kentucky I walked around checking out the booths. One booth offered homemade jams and jellies along with fresh churned butter. I spied a bottle of dandelion jelly which brought back memories of my grandmother and her house in Newport, Kentucky. The bluegrass and old-time music made a perfect backdrop for this trip down memory lane so I took out my recorder and started working on this piece. When I got back home I drove past the area I grew up in Newport, starting with my Aunt Juanita's house at 7th & Roberts where we lived three different times in my life.

The Homestead

The house we lived in at 7th & Robert still stands but the red brick is now painted blue. I walked to third grade from here, 6 blocks due east. After my baby sister died, my mother wanted to be elsewhere. We moved more than a dozen times when I was a child but we never owned a home.
Sadly my parents provided no homestead but we had one, nonetheless. It was my grandparents’ house on Washington Avenue in Newport. It was the last house before you came to the floodwall. 111 Washington faced west and we would watch the traffic crossing the Central Bridge. This house that had survived two floods, witnessed babies and grandbabies being born and leaned a bit toward the north. This house hosted the Christmas gatherings around grandma’s tinsel tree with the light wheel casting a change of colors as it turned. This was where we celebrated Easter in our lovely little dresses and suits. We had family cook outs in the yard and dinners in the dining room, each of us waiting our turn by age at the big wooden table or at the red formica in the kitchen. This house was our homestead. We even lived there off and on when times were tough or Mom and Lou had gone off somewhere. Lou moved us quite a lot, trying new adventures or working on the river but we always came back to the homestead.

Valarie and Aunt Sheila on the front porch

On the sidewalk in front of Grandma’s house at 111 Washington Avenue. The stairs up the floodwall were narrow and broken. Now the stairs are new and wide across from the office building that replaced my grandmother's house.

My mother holding me on the side of grandma's house.

The Scott's house had not yet burned down.

The house at 111 Washington was a shotgun with three rooms up and three rooms down. The bathrooms were added onto the back but they never were warm and the pipes froze in the winter. The side yard doubled when the Scott’s house next door burned to the ground. Grandma bought the lot and Lou put in rich, green sod. Each night in the heat of summer Grandma would water the grass with her hose, sprinkling any grandchildren who ran through the yard. She would carefully check the fence to make sure no dogs got in to violate her dandelions. “It makes great wine” she said. “But mostly I eat the greens. Don’t want no dogs ruining my dandelions”. She’d even water the dreaded forsythia bush near the front gate that offered up switches to swing against our bare legs for any wrong deed. It took the place of the willow switches she had felt in her youth. Just the same, we had to cut our own switch, trim the yellow flowers and deliver it into her hands. I still remember the swish it made as it came for flesh.
We would sit on the front porch and watch the cars go by. In the early 1900’s the view was of the river, not the tall floodwall that now protected the city. We’d climb that wall to see the Delta Queen go by and in our late teens, to watch the WEBN fireworks with a ring-side seat.

Nancy and Aunt Juanita in the kitchen.

My favorite memory of the back yard was grandma’s quilting frame. My cousins and I could sit beneath and watch the fingers and the thread weaving through the fabric as friends and relatives would talk as they worked. So many of us had played there that the yard behind the back porch was bare of grass. It was shaded by a large tree and we could take the bent, galvanized tub and fill it with water for a cool dip on a hot day
The basement of the house was musty with a dirt floor. You had to stoop to go down the steep, wooden steps from the dining room. I rarely went down there except when grandma needed something that had been canned and stored on the shelves of the old pantry that sat in the back. Thankfully Grandma didn’t need canned goods very often.
Behind my grandparents house was a trailer park and one tiny little house. Mr. and Mrs. Givens lived there. They were a large couple who lived in its three tiny rooms. In the evening they would sit on their front porch which faced my grandmother’s back yard. Both of them chewed tobacco and smoked corn cob pipes. “Mountain folk” my grandmother told me.
Sheila and Grandma in the back yard. The Givens’ house is behind them, tucked into the trailer park.

Sheila and grandma in the back front

with the Givens' house behind them.

My mother wasn’t born in that house, just a few blocks over on Saratoga but her younger sisters and brother were. Two sisters died there and Benny left for Korea from that house, never to return.
I remember when grandma saved up for wall-to-wall carpet for the living room. It was gold and new and soft to the touch, much quieter than the squeaking linoleum in the other rooms. Grandpa thought it much too fancy and being his ornery self would spit tobacco as he walked through the room. Not much, just enough to leave a tiny spot to get the old woman riled.
I slept many nights on a pallet on the living room floor. There was no air conditioning but grandma had a fan and when I was the only grandchild there I would lay right in front of that fan. The hum and the air would lull me to sleep. She told me that they had slept on pallets in the yard, watered down to keep them cool when the weather was too hot to be in the house.
In the cold weather, while I was still small, grandma would rock me to sleep in her skirt. As a young child my grandmother looked mighty. She lost weight as she aged, living on coffee, Grape Nuts and grapefruit. When I was grown and she was 80 she was half the size I remembered. Grandma would sit on the sofa with her knees spread so that her long, wide skirt hung clear to her ankles and the fabric would create a swing. I could sit in that skirt and she would sing to me, thumping her feet and swaying her knees. “Who da linga dink dump do dump da, do dump du dumpa do dumpa” were her words. Words without meaning but soothing. Some nights I would curl up behind her on the sofa as she watched the late movies, conforming to the hollow made by her knees with my head on her hip .
In the daytime she sat on her sofa, sipping her instant coffee, cold from her saucer. She watched the same stories every day from when the soap companies first put them on the air. We knew who she loved and who she hated. She wasn’t afraid to tell the actors just what she thought of them either, yelling at the black and white screen. In the summer we could stay up late with grandma. After the movies were over and the National Anthem sung, she’d get up from the sofa and we’d wander up the steps and snuggle into her bed. The rhythm of her snores and the tick-tock of grandpa’s mantel clock took longer to put me to sleep than the fan. The house was old and it creaked preventing me from closing my eyes. The room was dark except for the streetlight behind her house that shone through the window. I never liked the dark.
I tried to adjust to darkness as their house was always dark except for the light from the television. The depression had shaped them. Not caring of my fear, Grandpa would send me through the dark rooms to the bathroom at the back of the house to get his spittoon, an old coffee can he used for spitting tobacco. I would go, not only to stay in his good graces, but to earn the nickel that he offered. Sometimes after grandpa had had a glass or two of Weideman beer he would give me a quarter. He’d make me come close to take the quarter then he would pinch me on the leg and ask “where’s my sugar”. I’d kiss his scratchy check, trying to avoid his mouth, wet with the spittle of tobacco. He’d grin and laugh but a quarter was a treasure. With a quarter I could walk two doors down to Marcella’s bar and buy a bottle of Coca Cola, a bag of chips and a Hershey bar.

(Continued in Part Two)

John McCutcheon

I first met John McCutcheon when I organized the Queen City Balladeer's 40th Anniversary Celebration. I had also booked Jean Ritchie and my friend, Dave Hawkins, helped bring John on board. John and Jean had played together many times over the years and they joined together to perform Jean's famous song, the "L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore" at our concert.

The more I learned about John during our ride and conversations, the more respect I have for him now. Our first encounter five years ago had been less personal since I spent most of the time going through his agents and "people" in order to book him. Being busy at the concert I hardly had time to do more than exchange a quick "hello" and "it's great to have you here." Spending more than 30 hours in a small car and at a festival with him I enjoyed his company very much. We talked about a little bit of everything from music in Cincinnati to family to polite political comments to what it was like to be a traveling musician.

I was not an awestruck fan thrilled to be in the company of such a folk superstar. Instead, it was like having anyone else in the QCB or Ceilidh Group enjoying a get outta here. I appreciated that he was just a nice man and did not take the "I'm a star...you are just driving me" approach. Even with more than 30 albums and 6 grammy nominations under his belt, he never brought that up. He was just a nice man...an extremely talented man...but most of all a nice man, too. We both enjoyed the weekend and I look foward to running into John again some day.

My Chauffeur Hat - Seedtime of the Cumberland Festival

The subject line on Dave's email read "possible driving gig". It was an opportunity to pick up John McCutcheon at CVG and drive him to the Seedtime Festival on the Cumberland in Whitesburg, Kentucky. I called Chandra to see if she could find another sitter for Saturday and then contacted John and made arrangements to take him to Eastern Kentucky.

I picked him up at the airport about 7:30 p.m. and our first stop was for Cincinnati chili. Seems that John had lived in Cincinnati in the past and had frequented Acropolis Chili in Clifton. We found a nearby Skyline and his 5-way craving was satiated. We chatted about a little of everything in between calls John made and received while riding. Traveling musician is a busy life for sure.

We headed south then east but unfortunately I missed the turn to the Bert Combs Parkway and we headed a bit too far east. By the time we figured it out we had gone 30 miles too far. With a map (since John's GPS wasn't locating our position) we took a local road down to Route 15 and only lost about a true half hour on our time. John was very pleasant company and when we came into Perry County he told me about the cities he had visited and the people he had met through the years.

It was dark as we drove but I could tell that we were surrounded but some pretty big hills. Yes, I know that in Kentucky they are considered mountains but you must remember that I lived in the Rockies for four years and its all relative.

We reached Whitesburg about 12:15 a.m. and settled into the local Super 8 Motel. The lobby and halls were covered with framed posters of past Seedtime Festival on the Cumberland. It was hard to sleep so I watched some TV, drank some wine and finally slept for about 5-6 hours. I woke up early, had breakfast from the continental bar in the motel's lobby then waited to hear from John. He called, we drove to the festival, and unloaded.

John knew everyone and spent the day either performing or visiting with old friends. I stayed out of his way and just sat and listened to the wonderful voices and instruments that were everywhere in the festival. I bought some crafts, ate from the local trailer/food wagon and even napped under a tree. In the late morning I attended a shape note singing workshop. I sat with the melody group (can't remember the proper name) and John McCutcheon sat with and boasted the bass group. It was hard to follow but when the four groups sang it gave me chills! What lovely sounds. The professor conducting the workshop promised it got better as more get-togethers and encouraged us all to find local shape note groups.

During the day I met some very nice folks from the local area. Each conversation started with someone telling me"I like your skirt!". I( was wearing one of my long, broomstick skirts.) One of the ladies I met had the prettiest painted toenails I had ever seen so we started our conversation with fashion and proceeded to "Are you from around here?" That was always the second thing folks said to me when we started chatting. I guess my lack of accent gave me away. Maria, a sweet lady I met in the early afternoon, became my companion off and on during the day. She told me her name but when I told her mine she tried to repeat it three times before saying , "I can't pronounce that but I'll keep it in my mind". When ever I wandered near she would say, "I have a seat saved, come sit down a bit". I could not resist. Both ladies were darling company and when they learned where I hailed from, they started informing me that they could never live somewhere flat. Each related how a relative had moved up to Ohio and Indiana and couldn't wait to get back. "The hills feel like they protect us" the first lady with the lovely toes told me. I had to admit I felt a bit closed in but she said that was what she loved about eastern Kentucky. "Folks think we are stupid down here" she said sadly. I told her that when I moved to Idaho folks there asked if we people from Kentucky wore shoes. She shook her head and said that she hears that alot. When I told her that I was from Northern Kentucky she politely told me that that was more like being in Ohio. I had to admit that after being there I had to agree just a bit. I am proud of my Kentucky roots but I knew that living in those mountains held a special magic.

It learned quickly that John McCutcheon was there for a reason and not just as a headliner. As a college student he discovered old time mountain music at the school library and in his junior year he spent a summer in Fletcher and Perry Counties and met many wonderful Kentucky musicians. A film starring him and I.D. Stamper, a builder and player of mountain dulcimers. I was quite impressed to learn so much more about John and how long he's been playing and supporting Appalachia music. He had recorded at Appalshop and was pleased to be back.

The most profound thing I noticed during the day was the absence of typical "civilized" background noise. There was no traffic, no airplanes, no trains...nothing but fiddles and banjos, guitars and basses and the strains of a lovely voice singing haunting mountain ballads. The magic was rubbing off.

The festival itself was small but the music was mighty. All around the grounds you could sit on a bale of hay and listen to musicians of very age. I can't say every skill level because not one of the folks I heard could be called anything but excellent.

John played guitar, banjo, autoharp and hammer dulcimer. My new friend, Maria, said "That fella's pretty good!" After John's performance we packed the car and prepared to hit the road. While we packed, the festival grounds were cleared as much as possible with a few of the vendor tents removed and all of the chairs packed away. Local musicians took the stage and a square dance began. John said he would have loved to stay and join the musicians but he had an early flight and had to be back to CVG as soon as possible.

We drove through the dark once more and said our goodbyes. It was a lovely event and John was a fine GOH companion.

Bohemidippity Pledge

I have been angry today. I know, I'm angry many days, but this one was worse than most. Someone who has dealt with Jim over the years has turned out to be a thief and a liar. Most sad.

However, I am attempting to channel my anger to positive endeavors. When I feel like stomping, screaming, cursing, or throwing breakables into concrete walls...I will write songs, poems, prose or journals.

I'm not sure what religious or spiritual label I would place on myself at this phase in my life so I'm just gonna go with Bohemian. Turning fifty was liberating because I don't care (too much) what anyone else thinks of me, my music, my writing, my house, my gray hair or my lifestyle. I am a wanderer, vagabond and fairly-free spirit.

This is my pledge to TRY to be a calmer person. I can't ever promise because (as I mentioned in a past blog) I'm too superstitious and promises always bite me in the butt.

Bear with me because I think I "found" myself and I like what I found, although a bit lesser angrier me would be more likeable. It's Bohemidippity for me!!!

Weeds

The past two weekends have been filled with wonderful, dry, sunny days. Jim and I weeded and planted new flowers and weeded and cut grass and weeded and pruned and weeded and put in a dozen tomato bushes. Then we weeded again.

My friend Doreen loves to garden. So do most of my neighbors which makes my un-manicured front yard look worse than it would if their's were not such showcases.

We've tried to cut back on our extra curricular activities to have more time for the yard but there is still much to do before we catch up.

It's looking good, at least to us. Our neighbor on the north side came over last week and mentioned that she is considering building a fence between our properties. It didn't hurt my feelings, I'm doing my best. She told me she hates weeds. I know this is true because she just pulls up anything she doesn't recognize and considers it a weed. I hope her perennials come up soon before their roots are snatched from the dirt.

Hey, a fence might be nice. Her yard is pretty stark now that she's pulled up all the roses, and holly and other plants the past owner worked so hard to grow. To each their own.

I don't like yard work but it was nice to spend time in the yard with Jim working to make our house at least not be considered a blight.

Really, its not that bad. It is all relative after all. Jim and I both grew up in apartments without yards so by the time we reach 90 we'll have this yard work figured out.