The Red Flannel Rag

porch with the casket, a few raindrops started to fall. Mom looked up at the sky and said

through her tears, “Happy is the corpse that the rain falls on.”

I visited his grave with Aunt Goldie many times, and I would try to defocus my

eyes and see him lying beneath the ground, so close but yet never to be seen again.

About two weeks after his death, we kids were playing a game with Mom in the living

room of our house. I heard Uncle Rob call my sister’s name. She was his favorite of us

kids.

Aunt Goldie learned to drive, got a job at a silk mill in Harrisonburg, raised her

kids and died forty-five years later having accumulated a small fortune. She was literally

the first woman that I saw driving a vehicle--an aqua green pickup truck. She was also

the first woman to work outside the community.

Aunt Goldie loved to go to dances after she was widowed. Before she went out to

a dance, she dressed in bright colored, stylish dresses with big floppy hats. She broke

the traditional role of the mountain woman. As she dressed for the dance, she turned

from a working mountain woman to a strikingly beautiful, stylish woman — smiling

through her makeup. She wore her hair in a bun or braided around her head. In her

apron and work clothes, she looked like a woman who had put her hair up because she

didn’t want it to interfere wit h her work. When she was going to dance, she added a

stylish, wide, floppy hat, and suddenly her hair looked like a beautiful beau font.

She did exciting things with her widowed sister-in-law, Annie Reedy. They took

rides on the newly built Skyline Drive, a part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. They double

dated and went on picnics. Aunt Goldie always talked about her high cheekbones and

her high breastbone. She claimed she was part Cherokee Indian. I believed it until I

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