[Barbara Adair Bauer]

This is a bit of lore that DIDN’T get passed down. A couple times my grandmother mentioned the story “Rough Face,” a story that she was told by her grandmother, but she didn’t tell it to us.

I asked my uncles, and they agreed that she talked ABOUT the story, but didn’t tell it, they thought because it was too scary. When she mentioned it to me it was while describing her grandmother’s sometimes “colorful” language, which her mother didn’t appreciate, so I wondered if the story was too adult for the kids.

Don’t know if it was a native American or Appalachian story. There is an Algonquin story, “The Rough Faced Girl,” that was retold by Rafe Martin as a children’s book. It’s kind of a Cinderella variant – the poor step sister is forced to tend the fire and burns her face and hands, but ends up the wife of “the Invisible Being.”

Don’t know if that was the same story. If it is, it’s interesting that it was being told in the hills of WV around 1900.

[MarcSnelling]

Have many similar stories in my family. The bird flying inside the house meaning someone has died. As a real story not as a superstition. Having stronger than normal intuition. Being very connected to animals. Learning from animals. Spiritually a person learned by spending time alone in nature. This was passed to me not as a Blackfoot or a Quaker (Christian) practice. But as both or a combination of the two that became something else together, like Melungeon, but not by that name.

Where I grew up there was a lot of poison ivy I used to never get it. Once I got older and moved to CA I got poision oak a bunch of times. I spent a lot of time in the forest and bushwacked remote areas. The oak is not easy to spot when it has no leaves in winter. Where I grew up it is not like in Southern CA. Now poison ivy in Ontario gives me a bit of a problem. There were are a ton of mosquitos where I grew up, and horse flies, deer flies, black flies, no-see-ums and they all bite me. I use deet and long sleeves. When I say a ton I mean there are places in the swamps where there are so many they end up flying into your eyes and mouth even covered in deet.

Our family has been blessed with good physical health and there are not many problems except self caused ones. Alcohol, depression and mental issues are more of a problem. Healing the spirit is the medicine for that.

My mother wrote a book of the stories from my grandmother and grandfather. There was a strong effort to keep stories alive in my family, but also a small family and early deaths so it has been a struggle at times. It’s too long to post here but I will start another thread like the one Brenda Collins Dillon did.

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