Breakfast Blessings from Appalachia

Today’s breakfast, or the picture of its parts: homemade biscuits and gravy made with bacon drippings from organic pigs and A2 milk from heritage cows, or the bovine equivalent of heirloom tomatoes. Something like that. Although I don’t eat pork, or red meat for that matter, the busyness of mom life has tossed me like a bull baiter toward tolerance for foods flavored by animals whose flesh I won’t consume. I’m also a careful consumer of carbs, but a buttery biscuit with homemade love is surely a gift from God, and who am I to rebuke divinity at the breakfast table. I’ll do Emily Skye’s Grow Your Glutes workout later today to make up for it. I’m always making up for something. 

When I was a child growing up in North Central West Virginia, breakfast was heavy on tradition, and dairy. While my mom likely churned homemade butter as a child at her family’s quasi farm just outside city limits, ours came straight from the stick. My mom’s standout breakfast was creamed eggs on toast, an homage to the standard breakfast plate of her father, a welder and primo progenitor. Pap died when I was three, and my only recollection of him is like a second stolen from a Super 8 reel: a quick flash of his large, pale, lanky frame laid up in the downstairs bedroom of the sea foam green farmhouse he shared with Grandma and the children he’d raised with her, 17 of the 21 he created, that we know of. 

Maybe it was Grandma’s land where my fierce love of animals arrived in this world, wobbly on its new legs but destined for great strides. Many children of farm life, inured to the life and death cycle, develop an indifference to the welfare of God’s creatures. But I didn’t grow up on the farm; I was merely a frequent visitor who need not take part in the hanging of hogs or the forced altruism of chickens. The horses and cows had it best up on that little hillside where the air was perpetually ripped wide open by the chainsaw-revving of 50cc dirt bikes, the thwunk of BB guns, and the chorus screams of angry Appalachian mothers. I’m pretty sure the job of cows and horses was mostly ornamental, as objects of great affection by hordes of snot-nosed, honeysuckle-hunting, crab-apple crunching, dirt-smeared grandkids and cousins. 

Not far from Grandma’s was the home of an all-time favorite among the cousins: Aunt Kathy. It could take you five or 25 minutes to get there, depending on whether you trekked through the shallow creek at the bottom of Grandma’s hill, rode bareback through the woods, clung to the narrow waist of a reckless cousin on a motorcycle, or walked. You might pass Uncle Rex’s or Uncle Mike’s or Uncle French’s along the way, but you wouldn’t stop because on the other side of Grandma’s hill was Glory Land. Aunt Kathy’s was where “city kids” like me became feral (a highly relative term, mind you, as my city, a mere 10-minute drive from Grandma’s country, was still parochial small-town West Virginia). There were no spoken rules at her home, but you stayed in line because if you paid attention — impossible not to given Aunt Kathy’s particular penchant for volume — you’d know her kids were continually threatened with a form of torture you never saw but always heard about: “Do it again and I’ll box your ears!” 

On the hill across the valley from Grandma’s, childhood was all front porches blasting Alabama at night and grain buckets to catch wily ponies in the morning — but not before a proper breakfast. Here is where I learned to eat scratch-made pancakes topped with fried eggs and a squirt of ketchup.

On days like today, in my kitchen I pay homage to my roots. I also mourn the wondrous childhood my children can’t have, having been born in the confines of one of West Virginia’s only progressive cities with barely a cousin nearby and without the freedom to roam, via one of many modes of country-kid transportation, pastures and barns and wooded hillsides. At the same time, I know I’m wistful for wistful’s sake, sharing a poetic longing that serves a purpose in time like the life cycle of a farm chicken. If my longing were more like Grandma’s billy goat who devoured everything in his path, I might have to reconsider relocation. As it is, we’ve landed in the natural nesting spot for a girl like me who left behind the child of hillsides and hollers for adventures in various cities up and down the East coast and a little to the left. 

Just as my mother recounted for me and my brother tales of her own childhood on Grandma’s hill, I too will carry on the blessing of oral history.