Braiding Sweetgrass

to smother my sister and me in her deep, soft arms.
Sam was disabled, couldn’t work but received some veteran’s
benefits and pension from the coal company that they all lived on.
Barely. When he was well enough to go fishing, he would bring us
big catfish from the river. He coughed like crazy but had twinkling
blue eyes and a world of stories, having been overseas in the war.
Once he brought us a whole bucket of blackberries he’d picked
along the railroad track. My mom tried to refuse that big pail as too
generous a gift. “Why, don’t talk nonsense,” Hazel said. “They
aren’t my berries. The Lord done made these things for us to
share.”
My mother loved to work. For her, a good time was building
stone walls or clearing brush. On occasion, Hazel would come over
and sit in a lawn chair under the oaks while Mama stacked stones
or split kindling. They would just talk about this and that, Hazel
telling about how she liked a good woodpile, especially when she
used to take in washing to earn a little extra. She needed a goodly
pile to fuel her washtubs. She had worked as a cook in a place
down by the river and she shook her head at the number of platters
she could carry at one time. Mama would tell about her students or
a trip she had taken and Hazel would wonder at the very idea of
flying in an airplane.
And Hazel would tell about the time she was called out to deliver
a baby in a snowstorm, or how people would come to her door for
healing herbs. She said how some other lady professor had once
come with a tape recorder to talk to her and was going to put her in
a book, on account of all the old ways she knew. But the professor
had never come back and Hazel had never seen the book. I half
listened to talk about gathering hickory nuts under the big trees or
carrying a lunch pail to her daddy, who worked making barrels at