By Olga Sibert
You know the story: Grandma had a truckload of kids, mom had two and those two have maybe one, if you’re lucky. So the story of most modern Western communities goes and the Southern Appalachias are no different.
When I was growing up, every year we had a huge gathering at a local park. My Granny and all her siblings would come, along with their kids, and their kids, and so on. The last gathering was held when my oldest son, now an adult, was just a few months old.
My generation of cousins was small and when we got down to having youngins, with my immediate family in exception, it grew even smaller. None of the adult children of my children’s generation have any babies at all. Just careers and rock n’ roll bands.
Consequently, my children who are still little don’t know the world I grew up in. A world full of summers in Granny’s kitchen drinking sweet tea, going to baseball games with cousins, and working on our tans at the pool. The local parks do not ring with the loud giggles of their kin folk playing hide and seek with them.
However, just because their cousins, granny, and extended family aren’t in their lives – either because they have died, moved to the big city, or, in most cases, weren’t even born to begin with – doesn’t mean my kids aren’t having a nearly identical childhood to mine.
My kids do play hide and seek at the park. They drink sweet tea in kitchens and go to baseball games. They get their cheeks pinched, their hair brushed, and their bellies filled up with old-world recipes passed down through the ages.
Those aren’t biological cousins they run with at the park. It isn’t their actual granny who pours that glass of sweet tea. It isn’t their uncle barbecuing pork or their aunt spit-cleaning their cheeks: it’s their parish family.
Decades ago, my family was especially hard hit by feminism and postmodernism, and subsequently, as I have spent 20 years raising my children, I have been perhaps more acutely aware of the death of our culture and traditions than my contemporaries. I have, however, met many folks 10 and 20 years younger than I who are just beginning their journey of family life and parenthood; they are looking around and noticing that things just aren’t the same anymore.
Where they grew up with four or more grandparents, their children maybe have one or two. The Thanksgiving dinner no longer requires a child’s table or it is much smaller. They don’t have teenage neices to babysit on a Saturday night and get-togethers are getting fewer and fewer.
Last Sunday, my family attended Liturgy as usual. Afterwards, we had our usual coffee hour. Folks lingered around. One parishioner got out a chair and some clippers and began offering haircuts to the men. Many of us sat around and chatted like we were hanging out at Floyd’s Barbershop in Mayberry RFD.
The teens loaded up in a car and went for a hike around a nearby lake and dam. The moms headed for a park with cake and ice cream to celebrate a child’s birthday.
Prayers were sung. Stories were shared. Laughter echoed through the trees. Moms were tired. Dads scolded. Honorary aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all helped out. You couldn’t have recognized this gathering as any different from the ones we used to have on my Granny’s birthday.
I know not everyone has a small-town, hillbilly parish such as myself, but I encourage you to cultivate one as Orthodoxy is the fertile soil in which you can grown such a life. Offer your time and talents. Linger at coffee hour. Do the dishes with a cheerful smile. Visit the sick. Help mothers with young children. Tend to your God children and, of course, fast and pray, begging Our Lord and the Most Holy Theotokos to bless your community.
As Orthodoxy continues to move in and thrive in Dixie, Southern Orthodoxy is keeping alive more than the traditions of the Apostles, it’s saving more than souls. It’s keeping the traditions of the people alive too. Just as God originally created all things, that same light He radiates through His people is continuing to create and sustain areas of the hearth and heart long since given up for dead.
And in that way, Orthodoxy can and will assure that the South will rise again.
Originally published May 17, 2022, at Eastern Chestnut.
Olga Sibert is a 14th generation Southerner born in Appalachia. She is the mother of 7 children. Her line was reunited to Orthodoxy in 2019 when her family was baptized and chrismated. Every Sunday, Olga turns down the Alan Jackson before whipping her minivan up the gravel driveway to her ROCOR parish. You can follow her at her blog Eastern Chestnut: Restoring Strength to the South Through Orthodoxy and on Instagram.
