Franklin County, Nebraska

For Another Day

Big Coal River must be covered with snow, because its Christmas time. I sometimes find it hard to keep focused on my common habits when the month of December comes with all its holiday traditions. I don’t mean to, it just happens that my mind floats back over the years and miles to a place of happiness. Sights, sounds, and smells revive old-time recollections, and I think back to the mountains to a place that no longer exists.

Right now, I’m thinking of Maxine, W.V. in the late 1940’s and I want to make a visual picture for the readers; park on the right side of the road along Big Coal River. Three is a swinging bridge that leads over the river to the rows of houses where my grandparents lived. Walk left across Route #3 to the other side and walk up about four steps, proceed down the porch and turn left through the door into Earlie Thomas’ grocery store. I remember what the outside looked like, but my memory of the inside of the store takes on a foggy look. I see shelves of food and a counter inside to the left, back away from the door, but maybe this is the way I want it to look. There, on its used wooden top, we paid for the products while we learned of the local news of the day. The post office was also in this store. To this window in the back of the store, I ran one day to the post office window to see if my red patent leather shoes had arrived, and they had. The brown wrapped box has been ordered from the catalog a week or so before. To a four-year-old little girl, those red shoes were about all I needed to make me happy.

I have been told that before I was born (1944), my Walker grandparents rented a house from Earlie just next to the store. Earlie also lived near the store. His wife, Izaria, had long wavy black hair that almost touched the ground. I have a picture of her in front of a log house, and I have looked at that picture since a child, always in awe of her shiny hair.

What my grandparents didn’t raise, we purchased in that small wooden store. It must have been hunting season when I saw my first dear on the fender of an old gray 1940’s car in front of that store. My father, Sidney Walker, told me of an awful wreck that happened by this store during the 1940’s but there is no since adding gloom and doom, so I will just keep that story to myself.

There was always something going on at this little spot in the road, for people didn’t travel very far to shop in those days. I heard Maxine, was a coal town, and although I never laid eyes on the coal mines, the two rows of houses across Coal River made me think it mush have been up the hill from the houses. Alice Porter, my first grade teacher, told me the mine closed in 1927. She was 14 years old and walked to that mine and drew her dad’s last paycheck. She told me to make a right turn at the end of the swinging bridge and walk down the railroad track toward Bloomington, WV. The Maxine coal mine was along the track.

About an eighth of a mile up Highway 3, from Earlie’s store, is a driveway heading off the road on the right side and which leads down to the river. We would drive across the river in Aunt Doe’s dark colored 1937 Chevy pickup when the water was low enough and then up the hill on the other side to our clapboard home. This is the pickup she used to haul miners of this area to their jobs in other coalmines along the river. If the river was high, we had no other choice than to walk across the swinging bridge at Maxine and up the railroad to the home of my grandparents (Lummie and Susan). I really preferred the walk on the bridge rather than driving through the water, for I was scared the water would come inside the pickup. Aunt Marie (Doe) Walker wasn’t always with us in that green house, as she sometimes had jobs in other places. Back then, our feet carried us wherever we went. I have pictures of the family taken in 1942-43, just off the side of the road, opposite the driveway down to the river. Rocky hillsides were in the background of those photographs. In the black and white photos were young people with their whole lives in front of them, laughing and happy. I have pictures of Uncle Shelby Walker and Margaret; my father, Sidney Walker, and the White girls. There is a photo of Aunt Marie Walker and Bula, Luther and Boyce Bowen, Jim Seltzer, and a picture of Freda standing by the rocks. This much have been a gathering place of friends, or maybe they took pictures here because it was only a short walk from Earlie Thomas’ grocery store. I have pictures of people nicknamed Lucky, Babe, Zell, and only the photographer knew their last names. Now, we will never know. The people probably thought at this point of their young life they would live forever. From the brown old-fashioned picture albums, I can gaze at a picture of my Grandfather Lummie Walker. He is tall and handsome, even though he must be 65 years old in the picture. The picture was taken by the swinging bridge. In his hand is a brown paper sack, and I am sure he had just been to Earlie Thomas’ grocery store for something Grandmother Susan needed to cook with. She was the best cook ever. Lummie and Susan originally came from Brush Creek at Ridgeview, WV.

I remember when Aunt Doe and I walked up to Uncle Seibert and Aunt Della Walker’s house at Comfort, WV. We moved to this house in 1950. It was only about a mile and a half journey. “Are you sure you want to make this walk:” Aunt Doe Asked. A winter storm had just gone through, dumping at least ten inches of snow on Big Coal River. “Yes,” I answered. I didn’t think about how deep the snow would be on my short legs. All I thought about was getting to see my aunt and uncle. “Now you will have to walk all the way,” Doe said. So down the tracks, across the swinging bridge, and up the paved highway to Comfort, WV., we went. Then we turned left at Comfort and went up Joe’s Creek with me trailing all the way and soon begging to be carried. I can still see her brushing the snow from me when I fell down. I was covered with snow and was so cold. “You are too heavy to carry,” she would say, but I would lay money down she carried me most of the way. Once there, I warmed myself by the floor furnace. We spent the night in their comfortable home.

I’m told Maxine, WV, is mostly gone now. But…there was a day in the late 1940’s when Maxine was the hub of this part of Route 3 highway running through Boone county. WV. I think of those times, places and people running through my head like a motion picture, and I write them down on paper to protect them from ever being forgotten. To be continued…next Christmas.

What wisdom can you find, that is greater than kindness? Jean Rousseau

Rena Donovan, For Another Day.

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