The Red Flannel Rag

coming, she was busy with them while continuing to learn her role as a mountain

housewife.

Mom and Hilda got up early in the morning to get their husbands off to work and

then get the rest of the kids off to scho ol. Hilda told me recently, “After we got

everybody out of the house, we hurried up and washed the dishes, swept the house,

grabbed our baskets and back over the hill we went. In the spring we went to hunt

toadstools [morels] and in the fall we gathered apples that had fallen on the ground in

Dean’s orchard.” She added, “By dinner time, we were back in the house planning our

supper. We would make a big family pie with the apples we picked up.”

Hilda’s coming to live with us was a mixed blessing. Her p resence took a lot of

pressure off my sister and me to help with chores around the house, but her presence

also brought a bit of the reality of growing up in an Appalachian community, especially

for girls.

Hopkins Gap

The official name of my Appalachian community was Palos, Virginia, but only a few

folks remember the community as Palos. The common name came from a gap in the

mountains called Hopkins Gap. This name is as old as slavery because the gap was once part of

a large plantation owned by the Hopkins family. The original plantation home still stands as a

historical site, near Muddy Creek, west of Harrisonburg, between Mt. Clinton and Singers

Glen, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

33