mouseworks

...had a massive heart attack and isn't supposed to live. He's 86 or close to it (birthday in June, two years younger than my father, who's now 88). He was the only one of the three brothers who stayed on the land, a farmer all his life, raising sorghum and making molasses last fall.

He didn't approve of me all that much because I didn't play the typical female roles, but he was a wonderful story teller and much of what became "Alien Bootlegger" and SLOW FUNERAL came from his stories. People said of him that he really loved farming, unlike so many who did the work to eat rather than because they had a great fascination for the work. If he'd sold his land when the land prices were high, he could have lived on the investments, but, as he put it, he wouldn't have had anything to do. His curiosity was local, not about the world, not even about what happened in Richmond. I'm not even sure how much attention he paid to Roanoke. Martinsville was the city.

He knew all the country skills, could get us moonshine, ground malt for bootleggers, hired people to kill his hogs and sent his cattle off to slaughterhouses. Like my friend who raised sheep, he didn't kill his own stock.

He wondered what was wrong with growing a little weed and had some familiarity with how shitaake mushrooms were grown and had obviously considered whether that would have fit in with his other farm endeavors: cattle, hogs, molasses, vegetable gardening. He grew tobacco until he had a cancer scare (turned out to be his gall bladder) and then stopped growing it, never said why precisely, but tobacco is a hard crop.

In his thirties, he married for the first time, a woman older than he was, a mill worker with grown children and failing healthy. For almost the rest of her life, he took care of her until he couldn't and her children put her in a nursing home.

When he's gone, I have no more blood connection to that world.