If you’ve read much of anything I write around here, you know that I’m fascinated by the “granny women” of Ozark culture. Granny women aren’t merely old women, because it’s easy enough to grow old. To be a granny woman takes a lady with both wisdom and gumption.
Granny women were/are healers, spiritual leaders, and bulwarks of strength in our families and communities. If you choose to believe the older tales, they’re sometimes even touched with supernatural gifts ranging from the benevolent to the horrible. In the stories us hill-folk tell ourselves about ourselves, it’s usually a granny woman that’s standing between us and death, terror, or loss. The wisdom, toughness, and, yes, danger of these women well-seasoned with life experience makes for such a powerful archetype that granny women are not just a fixture of Ozark culture. As best as I can tell, every human culture that’s ever existed has some version granny women, although to my knowledge only our cousins in Appalachia share the term “granny woman” with us here in the Ozarks.
I come by my fascination with Ozark granny women the natural way. I probably owe my current existence to one of my great-grandmothers, a tough old woman who patched me up on multiple occasions where a doctor was either unavailable or unaffordable for my family. These days my great-grandma is long gone (hardly a surprise for a fellow in his fifties), but my mother’s mother is still going strong well into her nineties. And by “going strong” I mean that she lives alone and still insists on splitting her own wood for the furnace she fires herself. She says it gives her something to do in a day, and I reckon that she also knows that keeping active is how she’s come to within spitting distance of living to a hundred.
The granny women in our lives are so vibrant, powerful, and strong that we can be forgiven for viewing them as forces eternal rather than mortal humans, but of course we’re sadly mistaken if we believe that these wise women are anything other than human. That unfortunate reality is why I’m sharing these rambling thoughts today rather than one of my usual stories.
Last week my mother, who’s fixing to turn 70 later this year and is well on her way to being a proper granny woman herself, was diagnosed with cancer in her eye. We’re told that the best case scenario is that the cancer hasn’t spread, so she “only” has to lose the eye. The other scenario is . . . a lot worse. Like a true granny woman, Mom’s response has been to commence to scouting eye patches and trying to line-up a surgery to remove the offending eye as soon as possible. The rest of us—my father, her children and grandchildren, and the rest of the extended family—are hoping and praying that removing the eye will be enough, and that Mom will make it through the process with her typical resolve and good humor. Mom, meanwhile, is keeping busy reassuring us that it’s all going to be fine.
Of course, we don’t know how this is all going to turn out. The uncertainty is terrifying to all of us, even those of us who write made-up horror stories as a way of coping with the scary things that happen in real life.
I’m not going to turn this into a personal blog, because there’s plenty of those out there from writers far more devoted to personal sharing than I am, but I did want to let everyone who subscribes to this little newsletter know what has me feeling like I can’t share a piece of fiction that can hold a candle to the fears of flesh and blood reality right now. I’ll be back with a made-up story next week, and it may even have a happy ending.