Hillbilly Roots

My full-blooded Norwegian husband married me, in part, because I am half Norwegian.  He was sure this would mean that I understood him, his culture, and his ways.  He couldn’t have been more wrong.  What he didn’t know until it was too late, is that the other half of me is Ozark Mountain Hillbilly.  A giant clicking sound could be heard when this bit of information came to light.   After he met my father and my grandmother, there was no more doubting that this apple didn’t fall far from that hillbilly tree. 

My grandfather and his brother ran out of southern Missouri when the law discovered they were moonshiners.   My grandmother nearly ran them out of the house one day when she came home to find they’d dumped out the contents of every jar in the house, just to have enough room to store their latest batch. 

My Grandma Floretta was a woman after my own heart.  When she made up her mind she wanted something done, it got done.  She wanted a fireplace in the living room, but my grandfather said, “No.”  When he came home from work one day, there was a huge hole in the wall right where she wanted it.  “You can fix the hole, but it will just be there again tomorrow if you don’t start building that fireplace,” she told him, so he did.  A few years later she decided she wanted a basement.  Grandpa disagreed with the idea.  She went out and bought shovels and paid all the neighbor kids to start digging.  When Grandpa got home from work, he had to put a post under the house to keep it from falling in the hole.  Each day the hole got bigger, and that’s how she got her basement.

Grandma lived in Seattle for the bulk of her life, but she never managed to shake her roots.  You can take the woman out of the Ozarks, but you can’t take the Ozark out of the woman.  She called all children, “Youngin’” and she described people shorter than her five foot stature as, “No bigger than a minute.” When my grandma was 83 years old, she offered to help me move into our new place.  I told her she was too old to lift furniture and she responded with,  “Oh, I won’t lift it, we’ll just roll it!”  I hope I have that kind of spunk if I make it to 83.

These hillbilly ways are not Norwegian ways, however.  As stubborn a folk as Norwegians are, they are way too civil to revert to such tactics.  I was a profound mystery to my husband until he understood “from whence I came.”  He’s learned the two most powerful words he can say are, “Yes, Dear.”  He knows he’s fighting a losing battle when my mind is made up about something.  And as my grandma would often say, “And I don’t mean maybe!”