A Squirrel, A Sack and A Name

 
I Grew up in the state of Tennessee, the county of Johnson, the city of Mountain City, and the hamlets of Dewey and Doe Valley. We lived way out in the country about five miles from town…

 
My story begins when I was born on a place called Shupetown Road. My paternal grandmother was a midwife. She was also a medicine woman and used a lot of herbs and old wives tales for practicing her doctoring. She was born and raised in a place called Old Butler which is under Watauga Lake today. In her midwifery duties she delivered or helped to deliver lots of babies including four of my siblings. Today it is not uncommon to run into people she delivered.

 
On the morning I was born my father had gotten up early, grabbed his gun, a flour sack in which to carry his catch and set off to go squirrel hunting in the woods back of our place. He had been able to bag a squirrel and he carried it home in that sack.

When he came through the door, his mother rushed up to him and said, “Roy, you just had a brand new baby girl, what are you going to call her? He looked at the sack with the squirrel and looked at me and said, Virginia Rose”. That’s the story of how I got my name from a sack of flour.

And in the words of my Father, That’s it for Today,