My great-grandmother was a strong, self-sufficient woman who neither wore pants nor uttered a curse word her 90+ years. She also had a fondness for snuff that I found nasty. She lived in a log cabin in Middle Tennessee. As her children got older they added planks to the sides so that you couldn’t see the logs and a door to the front hallway that was originally an open hallway separating the sleeping and living halves of the cabin. Over time, water, electricity, phone and a bathroom were added although the electricity and water were rarely used. The weekend before Christmas her eight children, their spouses, and their children all gathered for a monster feast. While it was common to see fried chicken bought from the Piggly Wiggly and other easy foods at the Memorial Day family potluck dinner gathering near the river, the Christmas gathering required hours of serious preparation and cooking that had all the women in the kitchen and the men huddled together elsewhere. As productive and chatty as the women were, the men were stoic and relatively silent. Children were sent out to play and those that lingered were encouraged into the woods with the promise of long-lost Civil War relics and Indian arrowheads. I searched for years until one day I found a broken crock among other interesting bits of debris. I dragged my mother to the site of my great archeological find only to be informed that I had found some of my great-grandmother’s long-buried trash, unearthed by raccoons. I don’t think I searched the woods again after that disappointment.