A Piedmont Porchlight Story
I grew up in a time and place where advice fell on a boy’s head like pecans in a stiff wind. Every elder within hollerin’ distance believed it was their sacred duty to pass along some bit of wisdom that had been handed down to them by their own elders, who had gotten it from ancestors who may or may not have been sober at the time. Nobody questioned whether these sayings were true. Truth was optional. Tradition was the only requirement.
For instance, my Uncle Poot insisted that if you swallowed watermelon seeds, you would sprout vines in your belly. He said you could feel them wigglin’ around if you lay real still, and I spent many a summer afternoon sprawled across the floor like a young doctor listenin’ for internal agriculture. Never mind that I once watched Uncle Poot eat an entire wedge of watermelon with the seeds flyin’ everywhere like buckshot, and he never grew so much as a sprout. Logic had no place in family wisdom.
My Mawmaw told me you could cure a stomachache by drinkin’ warm vinegar mixed with a spoonful of bacon drippin’s. I never tried it, because I figured if the stomachache didn’t kill me, the cure would. But she handed that recipe out like she was runnin’ a pharmacy. Folks thanked her kindly, then walked away mutterin’ that they would rather take their chances with the ailment.
Then there was old Mr. Youngblood, who lived down the road and carried himself like a man who had graduated from the University of Front Porch Sciences. He liked to tell us young’uns that if you wanted lightning to stay away from your house during a storm, you ought to stick a butter knife in the garden and let the metal confuse the thunder. Even as a child, I knew this seemed like somethin’ the insurance company would frown upon. But there he was, jabbin’ butter knives in the dirt every spring like he was plannin’ to harvest them later.
One time, I asked Dad why people believed things that never seemed to work. He said it was because these little nuggets of wisdom made life feel less random. If you can tell yourself that drinkin’ vinegar will fix your belly, or that a butter knife will guard your house from wrathful skies, then the world seems just a little more manageable. A little more polite. A little less like it is tryin’ to knock the hat off your head for no reason.
Even now, long grown and supposed to know better, I catch myself repeatin’ some of these old sayings out of habit. I once told a neighbor to rub a cold spoon across a wasp sting. That bit of nonsense came from my Aunt Ruth, who used a spoon for every ailment from bee stings to heartbreak. The neighbor stared at me as if I had lost all contact with the medical sciences. I nodded and said it with conviction, because that was how it had been said to me. Conviction is the real secret ingredient in hand-me-down truths.
I don’t reckon most of these sayings helped much. Some probably hurt. But they were offered with love, and that counts for something. They were part of the rhythm of life in our little corner of Alabama, like the slap of screen doors closing or the first cold snap in November. Every bit of advice, no matter how foolish, was given with the hope that somebody might avoid trouble.
And every now and then, one of those old scraps turns out to be right. Not often. Not reliably. But sometimes in the smallest way, like when someone says you should carry a handkerchief because trouble comes quick and cleanup comes slow. That one has saved me more than once. So, I keep listenin’ even when the advice wanders into the strange and questionable.
Because every piece of hand-me-down wisdom carries a little memory, a little story, and a little echo of the people who said it first. Which means even the most misguided saying has one thing that works every time.
It reminds us of where we came from.
New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.
olbigjim 