Remembering aunt ruby by the trees

My Aunt Ruby passed away last week.

She really wasn’t my aunt; she was my father’s cousin, but she loved being called “Aunt Ruby.” Further, it sounds better than second cousin once-removed (genealogists will probably correct me on that).

Ruby Catherine Feather was born March 3, 1931, to Guy Edwin and Anna Susan (Strawser). Guy’s parents were James Walter and Estella Agnes Harsh Feather, the parents of my paternal grandfather, Russel Feather.

My father and Ruby were the last members of that generation who had memories of James Walter and Estella, essential resources when I began researching My Fathers’ Land. On several occasions, I interviewed Ruby about her recollections of these ancestors who departed this life decades ago. Her childhood stories of working on their farms were always delivered with a longing smile and a sparkle in her brown eyes. She made me wish for something I never possessed, but probably would have been miserable doing—a Farmer Feather I am not.

Walter and Estella owned a 150-acre farm near Eglon. They farmed it with just a team of draft horses named Nip and Tuck. Both grandchildren recalled the Thanksgiving-day of hog butchering on the farm, their grandfather’s gift of a silver dollar at Christmas, and the big farmhouse from which eight children graduated into the world.

James Walter moved off the farm in the mid-1950s, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. The property left the family, and over the years it has been used for cattle, hog, and sheep farming. Their farmhouse was removed decades ago by a subsequent owner.

After paying a short visit to Ruby’s children and grandchildren Sunday afternoon, I drove out to the old farm, a place I often visited with my paternal grandfather, Russel Feather, in the 1970s and 1980s. He loved to drive me to the ridge that overlooks the farm from Cathedral Way Road. He’d park the truck at the summit and reminisce about growing up a farm boy while I snapped photos of the breath-taking scenery. Although he worked as a carpenter and coal mine tipple operator during adulthood, my grandfather dabbled in farming and was proud of having been a part of this rolling land’s subsistence-farming heritage.

Five years ago, my father and I visited the farm on a July afternoon. While he posed for the photo that would be on the cover of My Fathers’ Land book, he shared stories of walking from his home in Eglon to his grandparents’ farm, toiling for a few pieces of silver an hour, and accompanying James Walter on his weekly trip to the Tucker County mining town of Thomas. Back in January 2022, Ruby also shared memories of these trips that involved selling meat, produce, eggs, and dairy to the shop owners on Front Street.

Their stories whispered in my memory as I drove past the farm during my visit Sunday. I parked my car near the old barn and walked down the freshly paved, one-lane road I once traveled with my grandfather in his red pickup. A cow bellowed in the distance. The air was otherwise as still as it was fresh, sweetened by the occasional whiff of silage and the fumes from a passing ATV. The low sun cast autumnal shadows across the rolling green and light-tan landscape, revealing the exact, rolling patterns made by the corn planter on the distant hillside five months earlier.

A week earlier, my wife, father, and I drove this road following a visit with Ruby and her daughter, Marilyn. I left her house with moist eyes, sensing it would be the last time she and my father would talk, reminisce, and hold each other’s hands.

Although frail and failing, Ruby asked Marilyn about the farm machinery she heard groaning outside their home. “It’s the farmers harvesting their corn,” Marilyn explained. “They are taking advantage of the good weather.”

Sunday afternoon, a few rows of stalks still stood on the hill, but the orange and yellow maple leaves prevalent a week ago were gone. For the first time in my many visits to the farm, I noticed a row of large, scared, gray maple trees lining the narrow road that fronted the property. Not a single limb remained on the road-facing sides of tortured trees. A wound from one of the amputations housed a bird’s nest; a colony of weeds sprouted in another.

Knowing that on a subsistence farm every occupant earned its place, I surmised that the trees produced sap for the maple syrup that was part of the farm’s business plan. I imagined my father, 10 or 12 years ago, ferrying galvanized pails laden with sad to a sled pulled by old Nip and Tuck as he helped his grandfather with the late-winter chore. I imagined Ruby and my father climbing the trees on Sunday afternoons while siblings, parents, aunts and uncles dined on fresh vegetables and meats raised on the farm. I imagined the life that eluded me by a generation and my parents’ move to Ohio, where the air was tinged with the stench of industry and opportunity this old farm could no longer provide.

On the pasture side of these maples, long, undulating, low-lying branches stretched out like fingers beckoning a child to ascend them to the land of make believe. Cracked and crooked, the limbs were neither mine to explore nor substantial enough to support my 130 pounds. In this moment of reflection and grieving, the whole world felt frail and aged. No Feather would ever again make memories in these branches.

I returned to my car and drove the old road up to Stemple Ridge, past the distant dairy farm where Estella grew up milking cows. Helios brushed what was left of autumn with golden kisses until only the oaks’ crispy crowns received its affection. Darkness descended; the light of autumn flickered and within minutes was extinguished.

One more autumn had come and gone; one more relative graduated into the heavenly choir of ancestors from My Fathers’ Land.

In January 2022, I interviewed Ruby for the book, My Fathers’ Land. The interview was filmed, and I share in the following video a few of her stories of growing up on the Feather farm.