The Chairs

The Bell

The Well Cup

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

  

            The Shelley family reunion picnic last weekend on Mogollon Creek gave us a chance to smell rain and be reminded what the color of green is.

            Both were welcome and served as a reminder the idea of a reunion means more than the convergence of family and friends. The gathering brought us back to our roots.

            It was a good day. If we had been asked what it all meant as we departed, the outcome would have been the years we spent with the original influences of our youth … were much better than the times we now live.

            Another recent discussion emphasized that very thing.

            A point was made. If you had to choose with whom to have a meaningful conversation, the preference would be the person who lived through tough times relying on his own wits and finding some way to prevail. Those that came before us when this was a new land without structure became the prevailing subjects. They got the nod and our attention.

            They had no idea how tough they were.

            There were no safety nets. There was no social security, Medicare, unfunded liability pensions, vacations, mandated fuel blends, rural electricity, pizza, farm to market roads, ride shares, television, telephones, or airplanes. Those things came much later.

            What could be counted upon was a much-shortened list.

            Bibles were worn and tagged. Penmanship was stressed and some could be judged as artform. To those lucky households that had musical inclinations, perhaps pianos, guitars, or violins were part of family interactions, but, even before that, self-reliance was a condition of existence.

            Simplicity was the norm.

            The Chairs

There are two chairs that could have been added to the display of the antique recliner couch displayed at that recent picnic. One still resides above the creek below the picnic area in the single room log cabin that was constructed within the year of the family’s arrival in 1884. It probably was considered a real luxury when it was brought into the room and placed there in the northwest corner. What catches your attention is the depression worn into the leading edge of its right arm. It was there, the patriarch cracked walnuts in his few hours of leisure. A depression was ground into it.

            The other chair now resides in the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum.

            It represents the extent of furnishings brought from Texas in that overland trip. By day, it served as the springboard in the wagon driven by the matron of the family. At night, it was handed down to be placed near the campfire where a meal was prepared. Before bedtime, each of the four children was called in succession by their mother for a moment of importance. It was a reminder that home now existed within the family unit rather than a physical dwelling they no longer occupied.

 

            She would hold each and rock them soothing fears of that big open. It was not a day in the country, either. It was an immense, lonely, and even dangerous place. Her children remembered, though, and each of them probably told their descendants of those times. One of those children, one of the two girls, chronicled her memories and other things of those times in cursive script that resides to this day in a special place. She wrote it for her children, her grandchildren, and those that were to come even later.

            It was important to her, and has become even more to those of us for whom it was intended.

            The Well Cup

            A Range Magazine story years later offered another glimpse of her.

            Her well cup was hung there on the windmill tower off the porch from her kitchen in the house under the mesa. Everything had been there long before our earliest memories. The plain tin cup hung on a chain and was used to drink water drawn from the well in a bucket. The well was hand dug and the water was cold whether it was in the middle of winter or the heat of a Gila River summer.

            Generations of family along with all the assortment of cowboys, farm workers, friends and visitors knew it and partook of it with gusto before entering the house. Nobody worried about sharing it and catching something. The sun and the fresh air were no doubt a worthy combination for sanitizing.

            We didn’t dwell on that sort of thing.

            The simplicity of the cup and how it was shared is striking in today’s world. It became a symbol of curiosity to the youth, a respite from hard labor and the grind to those who came in hot from work, and a magnet of conversation to family and friends who stood around and talked.  Memories of groups of people there are still vivid.

            Try to find such a comparison today.

            The Bell

            At the Will Shelley home just down the road from Shady Bend, there was a big bell just out the kitchen door (Will was one of the two little boys rocked by his mother in that chair in the overland trip from Texas).

            We were always told it was there for warning in the event of an Indian raid. It was the story given to every little child, and it sure made an impression on us. There hadn’t been an Indian raid since 1885, but there were still folks who had experienced it firsthand. The better story would be the bell was mounted to call the family together from time to time. That is a better, lasting story.

Memories from each of the objects are condensed into simplistic images. They are formed around the people who became as much part of the landscape as the images.

Their descendants came from many places to be home last Saturday.

 

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “We became and extension of those people which makes each image even more symbolic.”