White clover and other clovers are beautiful plants to grow--
even though some neighbours think that you are morally depraved for growing it.

I used to have a lawn service to mow, edge and trim things. He said he was going to get rid of the weeds in the lawn for me.
I was so confused at first. All I had was clover, English daisies, spearmint, a few dandilions, and some other very low growing flowering plants in the lawn. We came to an agreement, no disturbing the wonderful flowering plants in the lawn.

Yes, there is that problem with neighbors, Caroline!
Mostly I just ignore them.

I have a guy who mows, Lynn, but he doesn't touch my 'weeds'!

Hmm. I've never seen it growing on my property. Too harsh an environment here for that plant, probably. We do have some wild oxalis, however.

Not sure, Linda, though the NSDA shows it grows there. It's a pretty rugged plant once it gets established.

http://plants.usda.gov/java/pr...

Great article as usual Sharon. I have lots of clover in my lawn and I love it's wonderful sweet fragrance when in bloom.

Thanks Margaret. I noticed last night when I looked at the NSDA map that it grows also in your area. Glad you like it, too!

It might grow in Texas. Not all the state is as hard-core drought-prone as my area is.

Sharon said:Anytime; those little old ladies taught me well and I still have a bunch of their papers.

I had to look up 'antirheumatic' though, because Aunt Bett had written 'give for rumanticks'.
I had to say that one out loud.

I sure hope that's what she meant.

Sharon, that is so funny about the antirheumatic! It reminded me of how my elderly kin in Missouri says it: rumatiz! Now that I have arthritis, that word is in my head and I almost say it sometimes.

I let clover grow, too, for the bees. In fact, I caught a public works guy mowing it down in another suburb and called the city manager. I was very nice and just said it's really good to leave it for our pollinators. She was very receptive! You really can catch more "bees" with honey than with vinegar, right?

You should try reading their recipes sometimes. First time I tried making gingerbread I ran across this:

1Classes

It isn't the sound of what they said that drives me nuts, it's the writing. I couldn't figure out what a Classes was and why it would go in gingerbread. So I had to take my memories back about 50+ years and go through an entire gingerbread making scene in order to understand. I usually watched the whole process because I got to use the scraps of dough to make my own gingerbread man.

1Classes = 1 cup of molasses

And I know all about rumatiz!!

Thanks about the clover; you did good with the city manager. And so right about the honey.

Sharon said:You should try reading their recipes sometimes. First time I tried making gingerbread I ran across this:

1Classes

It isn't the sound of what they said that drives me nuts, it's the writing. I couldn't figure out what a Classes was and why it would go in gingerbread. So I had to take my memories back about 50+ years and go through an entire gingerbread making scene in order to understand. I usually watched the whole process because I got to use the scraps of dough to make my own gingerbread man.

1Classes = 1 cup of molasses.

That is adorable! Love it!

P.S. Ann, I just have to say, I love your signature: "If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went" My sentiments exactly! However, I think heaven IS where they go. Probably more critters there than people!

Sharon said:You should try reading their recipes sometimes. First time I tried making gingerbread I ran across this:

1Classes

It isn't the sound of what they said that drives me nuts, it's the writing. I couldn't figure out what a Classes was and why it would go in gingerbread. So I had to take my memories back about 50+ years and go through an entire gingerbread making scene in order to understand. I usually watched the whole process because I got to use the scraps of dough to make my own gingerbread man.

1Classes = 1 cup of molasses

And I know all about rumatiz!!

Thanks about the clover; you did good with the city manager. And so right about the honey.

I told someone yesterday that growing up, I spoke two languages -- English and Hillbilly. I knew all about warshers and overhalls and heldicopters and rumatiz, etc. But I have to say, Sharon - I might speak it but I don't think I could read/write it. I'd have never gotten "cup of molasses" from that.

My brother recently did a survey of the large cemetery where our ancestors are buried. He plotted each grave and searched records until he had the names and dates on each of those, if those dates were not already there. My maternal grandfather had kept meticulous records anyway, so there weren't many that had remained unidentified. The cemetery's oldest graves hold the remains of the first settlers in the area, and they are those of our great great greats, etc. who settled the area. The dates go back to the very early 1700s, not long after they arrived in this land, mostly coming from Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

They are the ones who bartered with the Native Americans for this 'dark and bloody ground', Can-tuck-ee, so named by the NAs because it was their hunting ground and they didn't really want to sell it so they called it dark and bloody hoping to scare the foreigners away. That didn't happen, so they settled the land bringing with them the sounds of the Irish, Scots and those from Wales. Some English thrown in for good measure. They also brought with them their music - long, low and mournful sounds - though no musical instruments.

So all this to tell you that the sounds and the unusual pronunciation of words in my area mostly came from those European sounds they brought with them combined with the words of the Native Americans. And in a lot of those hollows between the mountains, you can still hear those sounds, especially in their songs without musical instruments. Mainly it's a habit of softening vowels and leaving off the harsh consonants.

Like 'rooseneers'. Like heah. And theah, and over yon.
The sounds are still there with some of the old folks; young people have flattened them even more, distorted them, so that they don't really resemble their origins.

And rooseneehs? Roasting ears (of corn), say it fast and lose the harsh consonants. (Roos - en- eeahs).
Heah? Hear or here, losing the consonant r.
Same with theah, there; and over yon simply meant over yonder, not a very far distance.
I had to learn fast when I traveled 200 miles away from home for college, so I still switch in and out depending on where I am. I didn't get out of the holler much till then.

Those sounds are old, European and Native American all mixed together; I guess now they are all lumped together and called Hillbilly by some. But we didn't put the 'r' in washer so it didn't become 'warsher', no 'h' in overalls, either. We mostly softened the consonants. I'm not sure where the harsher consonants came from, a different group of settlers maybe, but our words were a little softer.

I became fascinated with languages and sounds long ago; the words of my great aunt and grandmother were like the music they came from and I still think they are beautiful. I go back to visit and that's what my ears pick up, those words. They are fewer now, but many are still there.

My brother is like me in that he adapts his speech patterns to the people he speaks to. But he can read it and write it and speak it just like I can, depending on the audience. When we are together we combine both, and his wife, who is from Ohio and my husband who grew up in Texas, would often just sit back and listen, sometimes just shaking their heads.

We don't find those sounds in W KY, only there in the Appalachians where our ancestors landed and settled. I have to be careful to not use them here if I want to be understood.

Too much info that you didn't ask for, ha!!
That's what happens when you find me on a lazy Sunday afternoon, doing nothing but playing around with memories.

my folks lived in the hollers of southern ahia (Ohio to more civilized/cultured folks), so it could be a regional/dialectical thing. We didn't sound southern, we sounded hillbilly. I don't know another way to describe it. But it was common to add letters to words (like "r" to washer and "h" to overalls), and not as common to leave things out (like the "r" on the end of hear). Grandma/Grandpa made 'shine, dad ate pogeybait (candy), and if we were acting up, we were cruisin' for a bruisin'. I grew up saying "y'all," and "knee high to a grasshopper," and lots of other phrases I no longer remember, that most yankees attribute to southerners. Biscuits were "cat-heads," if I recall correctly, and "cracker soup" (saltine crackers in a bowl of milk) was a favorite treat.

and none of this has anything to do with clover.

Funny. I never heard of most of those phrases. 'Cat heads', I wonder where that came from. Never had cracker soup, either.

But clover, well, since it's my article and since clover is not one of those things that will likely be feeding live stock in the middle of downtown in the cities, I guess it's OK for us to venture back to the mountains and valleys and 'hollas' (or hollers) where it does grow. What grew where we grew remains with us, including white clovah and words and sounds and songs.

Don'tcha reckon that's the truth?
It's jus' th' nat'rul way of things.

Memory Lane is a nice place to visit, on occasion. Sharon, all my roots are from the Hocking Hills/Athens county area of Ohio -- anywhere near y'all? Closest KY town was Ironton, I think? And it was an easy trip to Parkersburg or Charleston for shopping, if Athens didn't have it. Both my grandpa's were coal-miners, and both my folks dropped out of high school at 16/17-ish. (Mom had 3 main goals for her kids -- we would all graduate high school, we would all learn to swim, and we would all learn to drive. We all did, but she used to tell stories of walking my brother to high school with a big wooden paddle in her hand. He had a habit of leaving for school in the morning but never quite getting there, and Mom wouldn't know until the truant officer called looking for him). When Coal-Miner's Daughter came out, I took Mom to see it, and she said it was like watching her childhood.

Other phrases that were common -- a honky-tonk (bar or tavern, to other folks), For the longest time, Grandma/Grandpa had "slop-jars" in their house, and an outhouse in the back yard. I'm thinking it was mid-60s or later before they had an indoor bathroom added to their little house. The coal furnace was in the livingroom, and kept the house warm-ish in the winter. They pretty much stayed in the downstairs and closed off the upstairs. There was a cistern on the back porch that provided their water for the longest time, until they finally got "city water."

She told me once that a relative was in "the workhouse," and it took me 2 days to realize someone had been sent to the penitentiary. Folks with Diabetes had "the sugar."

Language was certainly more colorful then, if a little incomprehensible.

Maybe 250 - 300 miles to Parkersburg, I really can't remember. We were on the KY/VA line, close to a little town called Wise, Virginia. I had an aunt who lived in Huntington and to me that seemed a great distance and probably was then. So there and back would not exactly be a day trip, I think.

Coal Miner's Daughter's had scenes that were filmed about a mile from where I grew up in the mountains, though that isn't where Loretta Lynn was born or grew up. She grew up closer to W Va than we were, near Paintsville, KY, though I don't remember where Butcher's Hollow was located. Never been there. But Paintsville is in Johnson County, KY. We were in Letcher County.

So much for a geography lesson. I do much better with history.