The Red Flannel Rag

was being read to from the Hopkins Gap history book. Not a detail was left out and the

colorful and vivid descriptions placed me in the midst of the story as if I had been there

when it happened.

Some of my favorite times were cold winter evenings in the kitchen by the wood

stove when Uncle Shirley would drop by or long Sunday afternoons in the summer on

the front porch at Uncle Jim’s house. I could tell when a story was about to be told.

Uncle Jim would stop rocking his chair, take a toothpick out of his mouth, lean forward,

and look up into the leaves of a huge red oak tree that shaded his front porch. Finally,

he would start his story with “Have I ever told you about the time….” I may have heard

the story ten times before, but I always acted as if it was the first time. As Uncle Jim got

older he suffered from untreated maturity onset diabetes. His blood sugar was always

so high that his saliva was sticky. As he told his stories, his lips made a little popping

noise as he talked but the sound never distracted me from his fascinating stories about

hunting and moon shining.

Grandpa John Morris and Grandma Mary Morris

Mary Ellen Lam married John Wesley Morris when she was fifteen years old, and

he was twenty-one. Grandma Mary died in 1926 at the age of thirty-nine. She had just

given birth to her eighteenth child, and he was four months old. Grandpa John took

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