(Last week was so busy that I forgot to post this memory of two people who formed the foundation of my personality.)
On my left hand, in addition to my own, I wear a thin gold wedding ring. It is my grandmother’s wedding ring, which I received when she passed away many years ago.
Inside are engraved my grandparents’ initials and the date of their wedding: August 21, 1904… 119 years ago today.
John Francis Osborne was from Grayson County in southwest Virginia. Mollie Beatrice Kennedy lived just across the state line, across the New River, in Allegheny County, NC.
The two young lovers met at a dance that lasted all night. At that time, it was a tradition in the mountains for young people to meet at someone’s house for a dance party. The social gatherings lasted all night because people lived so far from each other and it was difficult and dangerous to travel through the mountains after dark.
I don’t know how long they embraced, but my grandmother, whose father was a prominent storekeeper and farmer in the Turkey Knob community outside Sparta, North Carolina, eventually agreed to become my grandfather’s wife and moved away from her family. Because John was such a stern man in his later years, I’ve tried to imagine him as an ill-fated teenager in love with Mollie.
The marriage license was issued in Virginia, so my grandparents, along with the wedding party, walked to the nearby Virginia-North Carolina state line and got married in the middle of the road, probably where it crossed the New River, according to one of my late aunts. There is no one left to tell us all about that special day.
Did Mollie pick wildflowers along the way to hold during the short ceremony? Was it a hot, humid day in the mountains? Or were clouds rolling in and they had to dodge thunderstorms? My mother said such weddings were common back then and certainly much cheaper than the opulent occasions that are so popular today.
As two teenagers beginning their lives together in these remote, barren mountains, as generations before them had done, John and Mollie had no money for a fancy wedding. They would need the money for the hard days ahead as they settled into a small cabin on a mountainside near an area called the Mouth of Wilson, which lay in the shadow of the Grayson Highlands and Mount Rogers before these scenic areas became part of the state and national park systems.
Their property was sloping and rocky…it was at an altitude of over 1,000 meters…and as I walk across it today, I wonder how they survived the harsh winters and hard summers. With only two uninsulated rooms to live in, they began raising their family, which would eventually include ten children. My mother, who passed away five years ago at the age of 90, was the youngest and last survivor of her immediate family.
My grandfather worked the farm with mule and plow, piling rocks on the hillside under the trees, and to this day the rocks still lie in the same place where he piled them over a hundred years ago. When I touch those rocks, it’s almost like I’m touching him. It was extremely hard physical work for the tall, lanky man who had a growing family to support. Below the remains of the cabin, a small stream still tumbles down the hill, a source of water in the days when they lived in those cramped, austere conditions.
They were surrounded by family. Our relatives all live in these hills, most of them staying nearby as they grew up, married and started their own families. My grandfather’s parents lived in a log cabin on the Knob, the family home near a mountaintop. The hand-hewn logs included two rooms and a fireplace downstairs and a large room upstairs, just a short distance from John and Mollie’s cabin.
Because my grandparents were tough and forged their own path, they established a work ethic that continues to apply to those of us who followed them. And when I look again at the gold ring on my ring finger, I think of how it all began 120 years ago when John and Mollie became husband and wife.
*My grandmother lost her original wedding ring when I was a baby, so my mother replaced it and had the initials and date engraved as they were not on the original. My grandmother then left the ring to me, the eldest of her youngest child’s children.
Cover photo: My grandmother’s thin wedding ring and my own
