Oh, To Live On Walton's Mountain

The Shining

I love shoveling snow in the wee-est hours. Unobserved, I stare all childlike as snow-laced wind sparkles in the pale-orange streetlight. I look up and let snowflakes land on my cheeks, melt on my eyelids. I love being reminded of the warmth of my face.

Something about it makes you want to twirl. Winter … it’s like God puts the world in a snow globe and shakes it occasionally, disguising every dirty thing with glistening whiteness. Sudden heaven. I owe it to the sky and myself to let it touch me.

But as with most pure things, it will soon accumulate a little ugliness. Get crusty with nasty black exhaust. The snow melts but the blackness hardens and holds on until it dissolves mud-brown. All the dog do-do and casual litter appear all soggy and foul. Potholes fill with greasy black water. AND I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

I want to jump out of a window – I mean open one. Go outside without a coat. Take in a fully belly of breath without coughing. Watch a flower open. If it weren’t for my new-found love of The Waltons, I’d go winter crazy.

Every day after work, I come into a freezing house, throw dinner in the microwave, clean up, go through the mail, clean the stupid cat’s litter box and feed the whore. By then my food’s done and the best hour of my day begins. I eat my suppah (Olivia accent) and watch my favorite television family.

The theme song has a tranquillizing but energizing effect – I hear it and become Olivia Walton.

Livvy Descending a Staircase

I wake before the sun’s climbed Walton’s Mountain. Lingering in violet light on a bed that my husband made with his lovin’ hands, I look around the room with its doilies and hand-stitched wisdom. I’m just about the luckiest lady every born.

A cool breeze unfurls the curtains as I relish the moments before I move into today … but I don’t want to tempt idleness! I face endless duties and demands and rarely lose my mind from the repetition. With seven growing children, no day is quite the same except in how much I love each one.

The change in my breathin’ is enough to pull John from dreamland. He smiles and kisses me the way he always does. Oh, I hear city folk complain about gettin’ bored in marriage and think they’d go crazy doing the same thing each day. But they’ll never know how beautiful the soul grows when it puts down roots in a home and a man’s heart.

John’s long gone before I’ve washed up and slipped on a cotton dress I’ve had for ten years. I twist my long blond hair out of the way, put on my shoes and head to the kitchen, tying a fresh apron around my waist as I descend the staircase – time to prepare breakfast for 11 people.

The supper table is huge with a bench on each side. It’s wearing a pale green gingham table cloth. There’s a white bowl brimming with the reddest apples that won’t be full for long.

John brings me some eggs and starts a fire in the stove. I mix pancake batter while the sun peaks through the pines. Morning touches everything with promise on Walton’s Mountain.

Livvy lights up at Christmas but is suspicious of anything novel. She’s not content unless she’s busy and is rarely in a bad mood, but she did go on strike once when she got fed up with the kids not doing their chores!

Of course she’s beautiful in the most wholesome way. But it’s the way she walks that makes me wish I was her – so humble yet important – determined. It’s the way she gets to hold up her head. Not too high, but with no shame to drag her eyes down.

I love imagining I’m an upright and attractive woman with a husband who simply adores her. I’d wear a hat and gloves to be able to walk with such respectable posture.

WHERE’S MY JOHN WALTON GOD DAMN IT? There’s no chance anyone reading this knows a farmer or logger looking for a wife with simple tastes, a foul mouth and a strong spine, eh? I’d even go to church – if I got a kiss when it was over.

Can you imagine the love in their eyes the first time John carried Livvy over the threshold of that life? “WHO DO YOU HAVE TO BLOW IN A FORMER LIFE TO BE OLIVIA WALTON? Oh wait, I’m supposed to be writing about The Waltons as a cure for the winter blues.

One time Elizabeth asked her daddy where she came from. He answered, “From behind one of your mama’s smiles.” IF THAT’S NOT ENOUGH TO WARM YOUR HEART, well I just pity you, then.

Going to Walton’s Mountain in My Mind

I remember Grandpa teaching Mary Ellen how to dance before her prom. Or Jason writing a song to the rhythm of Grandma ironing sheets. Their home is always immaculate despite the size of the family – I guess when you’re poor, you don’t have money for useless shit to leave laying around.

The Depression and Prohibition were a bad combination but inspired so many stories that make me feel better when I’m depressed. It’s nice to know things could be worse, but it’s Hope’s Imperative that one can imagine a time when people were made better by adversity. I don’t see a lot of that today.

Maybe what we need is a new Depression to make people honorable and kind again. Maybe that's the goal of "Family Values." Make us all poor to bring out the best in us. And George Bush is leading the way!

Or maybe nothing ever really changes – just the names and severity of the frailties that wear away our tender edges. But bitterness didn’t poison the Waltons.

Others cracked under the pressure of the Depression and then the wars. Hunger and hopelessness seep into the tiny cracks of broken dreams – over time they freeze and break them into bits. Not everyone gets a mountain to provide timber and food. The Waltons never forget that.

They never avoid a person broken with need – even circus freaks or bootleggers. They put the phrase, “Charity sees the need, not the cause” in motion.

They greet all the strangers and hitchhikers they pass on the road. They take in orphans, unemployed uncles, foundlings, refugees from the war. But the desperadoes rarely steal their chickens or refuse to make a bed. No one mistakes kindness for weakness with John Walton around.

But I can’t help think things have changed from “the good old days.” I see MTV and think the world has become what my grandparent’s predicted: A cesspool seething with gritty sex and glittery lies. All vanity and no pride. All sex and no love. All money and no wealth. Abundance devouring us.

I get so much sex spam that I haven’t had to have sex for years. Oh and love – it seems impossible. But Olivia and John’s dependence enhanced, not destroyed, their relationship. With so many mouths to feed, they needed each other so much and were never self-sufficient and smug enough to justify bailing during the bad times.

When I was in college all we heard about was the Industrial Revolution. If I my period was late, I blamed the Industrial Revolution. But before then, everyone did business with someone they knew. Ike Godsey just wanted a good life – not an empire. They wanted something to be proud of. To put their names, not faces, on.

Hard times didn’t allow for many mom and pop enterprises but back-breaking labor makes for a proud spine. You didn’t live in houses built by strangers. You knew highways were evil long before they were built. You knew there was no way to fix what wars break. I respect them for what they endured. But I love them because lean times never hardened them.

Good-Night, ya bastards

Winter winds rattle the storm windows and I imagine I’m eating angel food cake at night with Grandma and Jason, talking to the latest stranger to have appeared uninvited into our lives to challenge our souls and touch our hearts. Yum.

Does it matter that Walton’s Mountain never existed? That it was called Spenser’s Mountain in a ‘60s movie first? That they rolled two brothers into Ben and John-Boy’s name was Earl and he went on to create Falcon Crest? HOW DO YOU GO FROM WALTON’S MOUNTAIN TO FALCON CREST? Wait. I don’t want to know.

Myths eventually melt and get moving again, but it doesn’t change the feeling the theme song has over me. I know flowers rise from winter’s foulness. I can see moss where there was once ice.

Oh to live on Walton’s Mountain
With Ike Godsey and his General Store
You can be sinful on Walton’s Mountain
And they’re gonna love you even more.

Get the recipe for Livvy’s famous Applesauce Cake with Whiskey Frosting:
http://www.the-waltons.com/cake.html