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This is a story written in response to a prompt for "real, true stories" on the theme of "home." The "I" is I, narrating real memories. The other people are fiction because I never signed a contract to write the biographies of real people in their situation. Their situation is, nevertheless, real. Jane might be this person, might be that one. Don't bother about that, local lurkers. The story is meant to call attention to a social problem not a person.

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 The women of the Appalachian Mountains are as diverse as any other lot, Joyce Dyer affirmed in Bloodroot. What we have in common is a sense of place. Even those who no longer live in the place they call home always talk, write, and sing about home with profound love...

1

I was born two thousand miles away from home, on the other side of a city that was never home, because in between the house my parents had rented and the hospital where they wanted me to be born, the city was burning. Riot and defiance were in the air; some of them landed and settled on me.

Dad didn’t think he wanted to go home during those years when we were failing to be Angelenos. Not enough jobs paid enough to support children, he said, for one thing. 

Mother had no home. Born in Kansas while her parents were living in Oklahoma, she’d been a happy little “Okie” on a farm near a small town in Indiana in the 1930s. She liked the tiny high school, liked cheering for their tough little team against all the teams from bigger and better funded schools. When she was in grade ten the government decided to build a dam that left her home town at the bottom of a lake.

I don’t remember when my feet first touched the ground that Dad’s ancestor, five generations back, picked out for himself after surveying the land and designing our town. I would have been two or three years old; I’d already travelled from California to Indiana, Florida, Texas, and back to California. A few years later I remember feeling that my ancestors’ land had always been home, that even at two years old the ground would have felt better underfoot than any other soil on Earth.

Home was a farm near a small town in Virginia, where we were part of an old landowning family, but always the poor relations. “Oil” still presupposed “millions”; cousins had both; we had neither. Most of the material advantages children want found their way to us, usually secondhand. Actual money was tight. The real wealth, the source of status, we enjoyed was the extended family.

“After I had polio I just quit growing for years,” Dad said, telling my brother how to stay out of fights. “There is strength in numbers. I stuck close to my brothers and cousins. Nobody wanted to mess with the pack of us.”

Home was only a small orchard around an old house, but it extended to include hundreds of acres that belonged to relatives, where we were as safe and free as we were on our parents’ official property. Its privileges included store credit, taxi service, bicycles, horses, music lessons, summer camp, winters in Florida, books, records, a posher wardrobe than I even wanted, a tree fort, a cave, and at least a hundred elders to watch over us and give us good advice.

2

Two of those elders were Dad’s younger first cousins. Let’s call them something creative like Jane and Mary. The year Mother was ill, they took turns coming in each morning to help with the housework and “visit” us children. They were adults but Mary, literally the little sister, bought her off-the-rack clothes in the “teen” department. We loved both of them.

To us children it seemed obvious that their father, our Great-Uncle Vito, was rich. He owned only forty acres of land, but he’d owned it all his life and always did wonderful things with it. He could get anything to grow; he knew what everything you might find in the woods or fields was good for. He had once made a pet of an owl. He considered the owl a mistake and was content to be followed around by processions of horses, cattle, goats, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, sometimes young quail or a tame deer. He kept bees, too, and mantids to control the nuisance insects, and allowed a snake to lay her eggs under the porch. He was always doing something interesting and useful, but never too busy to talk, in a slow aristocratic drawling voice, to any child who tagged after him. Since he had eleven grown-up children and about forty nieces and nephews, children usually were tagging after him. As an example of what a country gentleman ought to be, it is still hard for me to imagine a better one than Uncle Vito.

His wife, our Great-Aunt Bertie, was a pretty good example of a Virginia lady, too; but she, and those of her children who resembled her, ran to diabetes and hypertension and fat. She was massive, resembling a menhir or a refrigerator more than a Southern Belle. But she was the sort of grandmother who observes babies closely enough to be able to set them on a potty before, not after, they wet a diaper.

A farm like theirs really needed more than two adults, so it seemed natural that most of their children lived at home until they were married. Jane and Ken never seemed to go anywhere else at all. They stayed at home and helped their parents. Every few years one of them might spend a weekend with one of their married siblings or someone who’d been ill; they never travelled. If they had finished high school, which I didn’t ask and wasn’t told about, they certainly hadn’t gone to college. They never had long-term jobs off the farm.

They were deeply religious in a modest, unassuming, even Anabaptist way. Spirituality was expressed through obedience to rules. The rules were freely adopted during private experiences that could be intense, but were not talked about much. One showed love for God by doing the house and farm work diligently, being content with low pay in bad years and generous with slightly less low pay in better years, dealing honestly and kindly with everyone, never quarrelling or holding a grudge, living within one’s means. If either Jane or Ken or Bertie or Vito ever broke those rules—I wouldn’t really be surprised, but I never heard about it.

It was a surprise, in my twenties, to realize that Uncle Vito was one of the poorest farmers—in terms of mere money—in the county. He never "needed" money. Sometimes he had a little money to give away.

3

Sometimes I tried to imagine what being my Cousin Jane, the placid baby-sitter, actually felt like. She was young at the time. She must have had hormone surges. If she did, she kept the urges to run or dance as well hidden as the urges to quarrel, whine, or sleep late in the morning. Jane was, so far as anyone could guess, asexual. Nobody remembered her ever having expressed any other intense feeling, either.

Sister Ann married. Jane was a flower girl. Ann moved to New York City with her husband. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Brother Bill went to college, university, seminary, became a minister. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Sister Carol married. Jane was a bridesmaid. Carol had six children. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Even Mary went to Pennsylvania to work with Don and his wife. Jane stayed home and did chores.

I heard a story, second or third hand, that a young man once tried to talk to Jane. Jane gave one-word answers to direct questions while walking briskly toward home. When she turned off the main road, the young man continued to follow. Jane brandished a heavy stick she'd spotted beside the road, shouting “Git off home!” exactly as if he’d been a dog.

I heard another story, at least third and probably fifth hand, that Jane had been brutally molested, perhaps even raped, by an escaped convict who ran across her parents’ land when she was ten years old; that that was why she’d grown up asexual.

I never asked whether either story was true.

She’d been an average student. She’d been reasonably popular at school; all reasonable children were always more interested in home life than in school life, and the eighth of eleven children naturally felt no need for more child companions. She went to church and chatted pleasantly with other women there, but the farm and her family were Jane’s world.

When Jane and Mary were baby-sitting, I classified people as Horses or Cows, according to their apparent metabolic rate. Mary was a Horse person, like Uncle Vito and Dad and me. Jane was a Cow person, like Aunt Bertie and Mother. Horse people were not always nicer than Cow people, but they were healthier and happier and had more fun. Horse people were positive role models, therefore, and Cow models were negative role models. Though I liked Jane I looked for her differences from me and hoped I wouldn’t grow up like her in any way.

4

After Mother was able to do her own chores again, and Mary moved away, my brother and I grew bigger and did different things every year. To my relief, my brother grew into a Horse person, a faster and sturdier little pony than I was, and after a year or two of infantile bickering we achieved a few years of real friendship, gardening and making up stories and despising school.

Jane stayed the same. Though she was taller than Mary, by the end of grade seven I was as tall as Jane.

I kept track of the different years by the different things I was doing: hand sewing, machine sewing, strawberries, pony, piano, tree fort. Jane, when visited, was always cooking the same meals in the same way, sweeping the same floors, tending the same fires.

Jane must have noticed some difference after Aunt Bertie had the stroke. It took her months to retrain her mouth to speak, slurring words, and her bad leg to move forward, not reliably holding her weight but following the rest of her, anyway, as she shuffled around holding on to things or people. Jane would have been the person she held on to, mostly. This addition of extra nursing chores made no noticeable difference to Jane.

How did she keep track of her years? Probably by the children and animals in her life. Jane baby-sat nieces and nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews. In her free time she made pets of wild animals and taught chickens to do silly pet tricks.

Year after year, children whose parents were ill or who were having trouble at school went to stay with Cousin Jane, and learned how to cut up and fry a chicken, how to crochet an afghan, how to bake fluffy biscuits in a wood stove, how to hitch the old Morgan mare to the sledge and drive up to the woodlot for firewood, and how to teach bantams to perch on their shoulder.

5

The children she used to baby-sit travelled around the world. The walls of her house were covered in postcards and snapshots, from every State and several foreign countries. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Nephew Jack, who was about my age, had a particularly bad trip. He married young and had two children. Then he became ill. When the doctor told them there was no cure, Jack’s wife attempted suicide. Jane (and Ken and Bertie and Vito) brought up Jack’s children, Ben and Beth. Other children stayed with Jane for afternoons, days, or weeks. Ben and Beth stayed all through their school years.

One year the bureaucrats in charge of the family’s monthly handouts decided that Jane and Ken should not be “under one roof” with their parents. Jane and Jeb had to have their own “benefits” mailed to their own addresses. Two new mailboxes were set up beside Uncle Vito’s mailbox. Two small camp trailers were set up among the outbuildings that surround every farmhouse. Whenever I visited Ken usually, and Jane always, continued to be in their parents’ house.

Another year, Aunt Bertie died at ninety-one. After that the house seemed like a different place to me. Whatever changes were made passed by Cousin Jane. She still cooked the same meals the same way, and swept the same floors.

Another year the bureaucrats decided that Great-Uncle Vito had collected too many handouts to own a farm. The land had to be sold for at least a certain amount. Cousin Henry bought it. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Frustrated social workers began to question Jane and Ken. Didn’t they want to travel, do jobs...to date? Why would they prefer to stay home watching an old man die?

Jane was sixty-eight. Ken was sixty-three. Ken liked watching some women on TV, he’d admit, but no, he’d never wanted to date. Nor had Jane. They had no particular craving to travel. They liked their “jobs” on their peaceful little farm. They’d been healthy all their lives on home-grown food, though, as they’d started buying more food from supermarkets, they were starting to feel “older”...

“Clinical depression, both of them.” Social workers needed to put something on forms. “Contentment, apart from natural grief” wouldn’t fit into their programs.

The visit where they told me they were taking antidepressants was the last visit I made to Jane and Ken. I’d seen “Prozac Dementia” before and didn’t want to see it again. I was glad to hear that neither of them developed it.

Uncle Vito died at ninety-nine.

7

Now that they were taking medication daily, Jane and Ken admitted, the old farm was a long walk from town; not that either of them had ever learned to drive a car, or wanted to. And, yes, the idea of dying alone in their trailers at night bothered them. Ben and Beth were particularly disappointing. Ben was at least trying to work enough hours to support a child who looked like him and a young woman he’d wanted to marry, but Beth just wasn’t doing well in the city at all. In the city jail, actually. Neither of them had time to visit the aunt and uncle who’d reared them.

“Now we can do so much more to help them,” the social workers smiled. “Apartments in a project with modern conveniences, where they’ll have friends, and their great-great-nieces and -nephews can come to visit....”

Everyone in our town had known for a long time that nobody ever visits anybody in the project because the project is so ugly and depressing. So it spoke well of Jane and Ken that some of their nieces and nephews did come to visit, before the bedbugs moved in.

One evening she invited me to watch a live TV news broadcast. TV reception had never been reliable at her house, and I don’t have a TV set; both of us wanted to watch the show—but Jane never found the right channel on the TV set that came with the apartment. Rent covered cable TV but apparently the channel Jane wanted, when she really wanted to watch TV, was extra.

Someone dumped a kitten in my yard. Having five cats, I thought the kitten might want to stay with Jane while we looked for its rightful owner or permanent adopter. Jane loved the kitten, and it loved her, for one day. Then the project manager warned me not to bring in any animals. Yes, the official policy allowed residents to have one pet—for an extra two hundred dollars a month.

Jane’s eyes looked teary. Well, it was flu season.

After the project manager gave up and admitted the project was full of bedbugs, all visitors were discouraged. Residents of the project had never been encouraged to walk around outside, either. Jane and Ken defiantly walked at least to the store and the library.

“Are you adjusting to it?” I asked Jane once on the steps of the library, telling myself that bedbugs can’t fly.

She said, “I cry every day.”

Relatives looked for Jane and Ken around town. After a few years we didn’t see them any more.

“Jane had skin cancer,” one of the more ghoulish residents of the project told me. “They cut off the tumor, and the last time I saw her, she had pulled off a bandage and found three bedbugs in the wound...”

8

“You’re old enough to retire now!” people who probably mean well—sort of—have started telling me. “No need to work or worry any more! You could get food stamps and an apartment with modern conveniences...”

And bedbugs, I think.

I imagine what it’s like to be Cousin Jane, now, not finding the programs you want when you do want to watch TV, always feeling the inner pull of instincts telling you that it’s time to feed the hens, gather the eggs, check on the visiting children. I think of songbirds, caged in laboratories, at the migrating season.

The bureaucrats can stick their modern conveniences up their noses, I think. I like that radios and non-emergency phone calls work only intermittently for only about one-third of the year, at my home. I don’t want television or Internet connections at home.

My home is no longer the same place it was when it was my parents’ home. I’m no longer the same person. Aunt more than daughter, I keep track of the years now by what I’ve been writing. I’ve travelled and done jobs and been married. I’m a more adventurous cook than my Cousin Jane was, but I’ve come to appreciate the pleasure of sweeping the same floors, my floors, every day.

“You’ll die alone and be found with those animals you ‘foster’ gnawing on your bones!” say relatives who’d like to get at least the cash value of my home. Compared with what the social workers have to offer people like Cousins Jane and Joe, even that doesn’t seem very bad.

I’d rather die naturally, at home.