Tales told under the Devil’s Nose

Tales Told Under the Devil’s Nose is an online front porch for swapping stories handed down by the extended Felsing-Brooks-Steele-Wohlwend clan.  That’d make it Mimi’s front porch out at The Pasturefield, along about dusk or so, just after it cools down a bit.  Now, virtual reality has its limitations, meaning you’ll have to supply the iced tea on your end. 

Apparently, before netflix, the dish network, or the interwebs; way back before the turn of the century; even before cable tv, air conditioning and 8-track cassette players; there was The Story.  I have it on good authority that people were in the habit of gathering on the front porch and actually interacting with one another.  I know, because I have seen it with my own eyes.  Even to this day, if one is very lucky and approaches the local inhabitants cautiously, and takes care to listen quietly and speak only in soft respectful tones, it is still possible to observe these customs in certain remote locations as they are practiced today.

Our stories have a lot of meaning for me, because I was raised in Wisconsin with my two sisters, with one leg and half my pscyhe springing from the hills and social relations of East Tennessee.  This is not something that tears me apart, but knits me up into a whole with more than one place of belonging.  The only way I’m bipolar is bioregionally:  the twin lodestars of Lake Michigan and the Smoky Mountains drew our family into a seasonal pattern, orbiting elliptically between Manitowoc and Rogersville once or twice each year, always with the lakes or the mountains pulling us on down the road.  Elliptical, to draw Mason and Dixon is not so much a line on the map, as it is an extended cultural gradient.  It is also not where you think it is.

This all came about when Dick Felsing met JoAnn Brooks in New York City, whereupon they fell in love and got married.  Though more promising job prospects to the North meant waving goodbye to the apple blossoms along the driveway, under which I am told the young swain asked Alix Brooks for her daughter’s hand in marriage, it could not make parting a sweet sorrow.  Even though counting those apples sometimes means falling out of the tree.

Growing up, the two-day drive South offered plenty of time to recount the family tales we’d heard so many times before.  These were pretty unusual stories, I thought.  No one I knew had names like Uncle Ham or Aunt Ruby, not in Wisconsin.  Second, the best anecdotes revealed real character, in every sense of the word.  Oh, they’ll deny it.  Granted, it’s not so much that each appeared a tad more idiosyncratic than anyone I knew, they just had personalities willing to test the interplay between observing total propriety and upending certain conventional expectations.  Or, of course, willing to object to such horseplay in church, indoors, in my presence.  This is why Mimi’s sly humor signaled a liveliness that to most kids is unexpected in ‘old people’.  This is why Aunt Jean threw the bull semen in the trash.  And this is why Lillian didn’t listen when her son Jake warned her not to drive up that way, and did anyway, so she got shot at just like he said she would.  All in a day’s work. 

In any case, those stories were how I got to know many of my distant relations.  Each two-week trip meant a whole rotation of visits, starting with Mimi in Rogersville, the Brookses out on Bloody John Sevier Highway west of Knoxville, and Aunt Jean Steele up in Johnson City.  After that, with The Pasturefield or Clay Street as a base, we’d fill up the rest of the vacation with visits to Aunt Mary & Uncle Lyle, Uncle John & Aunt Eula, Uncle Conrad, and it just went on and on.  I learned to say ‘yes, ma’am’ and yes, sir’ right quick.  It seemed to me that the the men didn’t have a lot to say, and the women had a lot of stories, good ones often enough to hold your attention.  Somehow, though, I knew I was expected in two or three hours to meaningfully connect with a whole constellation of elderly people three and four and five generations and several cultures removed beyond my own, or so it seemed, whom I didn’t really know at all.  As a small child, you wrap your head around that and soak a lot of things in bodily.  But I did know them, after all, and I knew how important they were to my family and to me.  Some of the cousins were so far-flung in time and space I don’t believe I ever even met them. 

In the end, the stories were mostly how I connected distant cousins and uncles several generations removed in time and space.  As a child of 4 or 8 or 11, rejoining something you know only on a visceral level is like being a stone tossed into an inexplicably familiar lake (except there are no lakes around) — something in you reverberates, and recognizes, and rejoices.  I’m not always sure what that is.  That something, unrecognizable and unremembered, is found.  The climate, the landscape and the people are all part of that recognition.  Even after being gone for years, getting off a plane and heading into a roadside diner, I’ve found the Tennessee accent of the hostess rings through me like the sweet embrace of a favorite aunt.  I am overcome.

Now, I need a good story.

(still to be polished up a bit!)