What Every Appalachian Grandfather Kept Under His Bed (We Were Never Allowed to Touch It)

🔗 93 things every Appalachian grandfather knew. How many are left in you? https://burlsizemore.com There was a box under my grandfather's bed, and nobody but him ever pulled it out in all my years in that house. A long, flat box of poplar, pushed back against the wall. The rule about it was the plainest rule in our house. You did not touch it. You did not ask about it. I broke that rule one time, when I was nine. He pulled me out from under there by one ankle, and he said there were things under that bed older than my daddy, and one of them could still hurt somebody in this house. I did not find out which one for fifteen years. The day after Christmas in nineteen seventy eight, my grandfather Wendell Sizemore was seventy seven and failing, and he knew it. He had me get down on the floor and pull out everything that was under his bed. Nineteen things, when we had them all out on the quilt. And one at a time he told me why every one of them was there. The land paper from eighteen seventy three, wrapped in oilcloth, that made us owners and not tenants. The red coffee can, because the bank shut its doors in nineteen thirty two. Eleven seed jars. Seven ledgers tied with string, with his whole life in the margins. A new pair of overalls for the day he might have to ask a man for something. A fiddle in a flour sack. His brother's five letters from France. A pair of little shoes that cost ninety cents, and a gold ring in the toe of one of them, seventeen years late. And at the very bottom, an envelope with my name on it. Seven of those nineteen things are under my own bed tonight. I will tell you which seven, and I will tell you what was in the envelope. The things people keep closest to where they sleep are the things they are most afraid of losing. My grandfather kept the farm ledger for most of his life, and down in the margins, in pencil, he wrote how a thing was done. A few years back I sat down with that ledger and wrote out ninety three of the things he knew how to do with his hands, the fixing and the making do, the way he would have told it to you if you had been sitting on the floor of that back room with him. Tell me down below what was under your grandfather's bed, or your grandmother's. What did they keep in the can, what did they keep in the jar, and was there anything nobody was allowed to touch? https://burlsizemore.com