Listen for the Grace

Just a little while ago I was sitting at the table with tomato juice running down my arms and off my elbows. This making of sauce takes peeling the skins after dropping the fruit in boiling water and getting out as many seeds as possible while you are at it. I may as well bath in it by the time I am through. Still the simmering smell of the sauce surrounds the kitchen and wonders out onto the porch area. That aroma takes me back forty years.
I remember the rich, delicious smell coming from the house on the hill, I was just twenty one. A very inexperienced social worker making house visits in Hocking County. I was way out in the cave area; somewhere above Laurelville. The family that I was visiting were clients that I had not met before. They had a big garden in the back and there was a grinding wheel and two mules. No tractor at this farm house. I don’t know what I expected, but I followed my nose to the back screen door and knocked. A little round woman with an apron and her hair up in a bun came to the door. After introductions, she let me into the kitchen. These first introductions were often awkward. I had found that most people do not like social workers because they are sometimes officious. When they are not, they don’t like them because they remind them that they are beholden. They expect you to go poking around and snooping. I had already been in some places where I did not want to go snooping!
I took a deep, appreciative breath and asked what that wonderful smell was. The lady was warm and tired. Her plumb cheeks were apple red and there were sweat beads along her hair line. She smiled and motioned me into a small dark room off the kitchen. There were bottles of jewels; red tomatoes, ruby juice, green pickles, and yellow corn relish. She had been canning tomato ketchup, When I asked about her husband, she told me he was back in the holler hunting sang for tobacco money. She looked down and said, “He chews.” I talked with that lady about forty minutes. I learned an important lesson that day. I learned about “The Deserving Poor.”
If there was someone in the kitchen that day who was the deserving poor, it was me; poor in experience and ignorant of life. My extended family were all nice people, good people, but they did not appreciate those who had not reached for their bootstraps. Men on welfare were lazy and worthless. Maybe. But what I found out was that these particular people and many like them in the county worked hard. They did hard physical labor. They cut timber, they hunted Gin Sang, and they plowed with their mules, and put grain in their own sacks and food on their tables. What they didn’t do was punch a time clock. You see most people in this edge of Appalachia came from Breathitt or Greenup County Kentucky. They were hill farmers until their land wore out from too much tobacco or the mines bought out too many neighbors. They just couldn’t stand being penned up in a factory and the things they did produced food, kept their houses warm with wood and coal pickings, but it did not produce enough cash in a timely manner. That was why I was there. I decided that day to learn to listen and to not paint everyone with the same brush. I don’t know who that obnoxious phrase “The Deserving Poor” described in Hocking County and I still don’t know. What I do know is there are as many stories as there are people, and the stories are all interesting, and we are all the children of God. I suppose in the sight of God we are all ignorant, poor and undeserving, but may we learn to listen for the grace.