Harvesting Resilience: How my hillbilly childhood prepared me for the pandemic
There is something about this pandemic that is reinvigorating many of my childhood experiences — the issues I spent sooooo many years in therapy trying to tease out and rid myself of. I am brought back to a place where I am required to use the tools I grew up with. All the skills of my heritage as a poor Appalachian (Apple-at-chun, that’s how we say it) Hillbilly are now being harvested for immediate use.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere — 15 miles over a mountain off of HWY 81 in Southwestern Virginia, a mile or so from the Appalachian Trail — in a place called Sugar Grove with 2 gas station/tanning salons/video rental/hunted game check stores, a post office, a K-8 school, a thrift shop open from 9am-1pm on Saturdays in the summer, no stop lights and A LOT of churches.
We lived 5 miles from there, between two dairy farms with no close neighbors except for the cows, on a little plot of land that was forced onto my family by eminent domain in 1977 (the year I was born) when the government seized my grandparents property, requiring them and all their kinfolk to either move from their ancestral home place or pay rent to the government. They were given a fraction of the worth of their forest, which was then made into horse campgrounds.
No surprise — this garnished my family’s general mistrust of government, as the poor were made poorer and, in a sense, more isolated, as the different sprouts of the family who lived along that stretch of dirt road, once next door neighbors, were made to move far apart — now separated by miles and, in our case, a mountain. My parents moved out of a trailer into a mail order house — you know, the kind you see on the freeway in two pieces — sharing with my paternal grandparents. That’s where I lived for 18 years and where my mom is now.
My mom was the only person with a job in the family. She was a seamstress making Ralph Lauren denim jeans for 30 years in a factory that was made defunct by NAFTA in the 1990’s, forcing her into a mid-life career change to become a CNA — Certified Nurse Assistant. Ask her now — it was the best thing that happened to her — but that’s another story.
To make a very low sweatshop hourly wage cover the needs of a family of 6, she was extremely resourceful. She canned all summer and stored for the winter — mostly preserves from wild raspberries which she picked wearing flannel and jeans in the unbearable heat after work, green beans from my aunt’s expansive garden, and bushels of tomatoes from the neighbors. Potatoes were grown in raised beds of stacked tires and stored in the basement. Hunting season would bring a wealth of cherished deer meat, which was often canned — YES — you can can meat. It’s totally edible.
To fill in the gaps, she picked up government boxes filled with giant bricks of cheese and name brand failed food products. We went to the grocery store every other week for a gallon of milk and bread and a couple of packages of Little Debbies as our treat.
At night, my momma sewed up leftover scraps from the factory into wearable items for us, causing static electricity to roll the warped picture on our black and white TV. She rarely bought clothes from the stores for any one of us except my dad. He was super specific about his outfit — long sleeve plaid shirt with two open pockets for his cigarettes, white cotton v-neck underneath, denim jeans (Ralph Lauren, obviously) and a camouflage Levi Garrett trucker hat from redeeming UPC seals off of chewing tobacco that she collected from factory friends. Luckily, he only changed clothes once a week for his bath, so he only needed 2 shirts.
As for the rest of us, there was a seemingly endless supply of trash bags full of clothes mysteriously being deposited on our front porch. People in our community knew our situation and were helping how they could. My mom still wears hand-me-downs exclusively. This front porch wardrobe worked out until I went to high school over a mountain in town. Then I started shopping at the aforementioned thrift store for $2 per grocery bag worth of vintage polyester gems with hopes of blending in.
The icing on the Little Debbie? We didn’t even have a phone in our house. Inconceivable when these days a lot of folks have 2 phones in their pocket, myself included.
Now I live in suburban Los Angeles, within walking distance of a ton of stores where I can afford to spend extra on organic groceries, I have a housekeeper and a gardener help me on a regular basis, and I own a business that can invoice more for a wedding invitation than my mom makes in a year. I am not wealthy by local standards but I am doing well by anyone’s.
Unless you got an ear of my thick mountain accent before it was diluted in college, you wouldn’t suspect my origin as anything other than standard American. I have sufficiently camouflaged myself, hiding my hillbilly in plain sight. I have adapted to the life of the aspirational middle class, the near opposite of where I started, though it may seem curious that my children run around without shoes, unsupervised in the front yard that’s littered with plastic toys (but thankfully, no rusting vehicles).
Yes, I got out. And it wasn’t easy. But I learned from watching my mom that easy shouldn’t be expected. What may come as a surprise is that even though I am better off in the obvious ways, this modern middle class lifestyle has never felt like the perfect fit. This is not a society that lends itself to stay in one place awhile — to tread water and live in the now. It seems that middle class rat race requires us to constantly look to the future for a better paying job, a nicer car and a flat screen TV.
I don’t want a flatscreen TV. I am more than happy with the hand-me-down giant Sony tube television that was old in 2001. It still has a great picture.
But I have adapted to the LA lifestyle, and after 20 years of living in this huge city, I am used to the contemporary inflexible expectations that things need to be a certain way or they are unacceptable and need to be changed… now. I have come to expect immediate gratification, especially when it comes to the internet and good tacos.
Then the pandemic was declared and we were told to hunker down, pretend our neighbors were miles away, only go to the grocery store when urgently necessary and, most importantly, accept the new directions from the Mayor or the Governor. Immediate gratification went out with the rest of the parties that I used to make fancy invitations for.
What a relief! Finally, something that feels like home.
I am being earnest. I have flexed my poverty muscles and, though it took me a couple of weeks, I would say things are relatively okay in my family’s quarantine. I don’t mean to pretend this virtual hermitting is a picnic, but I’m certain my attitude of “making do” has prepared me for this moment. I don my mask for walks with my kids by the temporary homeless shelter down the street and I regularly drop off any extras on my neighbors’ porches. I fired up the sewing machine to use scraps for masks, planted a little garden of organic kale and I will cash my government assistance check when it comes. This is as close as I have ever felt to my childhood way of life except now I have a phone in my pocket with access to the entire world. Not so bad.
What I am trying to say is that I think, somewhere deep down, each of us has access to these tools to deal with this new existence. Humans are amazing animals. We will adapt to whatever happens to us, collectively and individually. And it will be uncomfortable but maybe our cellular memory just needs to be reminded of tougher times of our not too distant past. Most of our recent ancestors had harder lives. So, it seems logical that with a little more time and willingness to accept our current circumstances, our collective memories will all kick in, and then things will become just a little more fluid for our day to day lives, even if we can’t go out to restaurants. Which, by the way, I have always found challenging and unenjoyable since I never had that luxury as a child.
You know who isn’t ruffled by this new way of life? My mom. She’s 73, and until recently was working part time at a nursing home, helping at the elementary school, cleaning houses and babysitting — all of which are shut down. She has no internet, 1 channel of broadcast television and a landline that goes out if it rains too hard. Instead of complaining, she’s still helping her neighbors, picking up essentials for 90-year-olds, and cleaning out the basement that’s still full of Ralph Lauren scraps. She knows from experience about the importance of managing expectations when things get hard and prioritizing community above all. She’s been living this way her whole life.
But for most of us, this pandemic will change our way of life, possibly forever. Now we are testing our strength at treading water — trying to maintain the present. For me, 18 years of living this way did me some good. The hardships of my past have reaped resilience. Isn’t that what everyone has been wanting for our kids? Aren’t they going to need this for their future dealings with climate change?
Resilience. Not something you can teach without real hardship.
So, here we go. This is how you get grit. Buckle up. And conjure your ancestral knowledge. It’s in you.
