Account of Pipe Smoking From Foxfire 11

From Foxfire 11, c. 1999, my wife spotted this account of an elderly woman pipe smoker:

"Her chair set by the side of the fireplace, and she had a pocket from an old pair of pants tacked to the wall by the side of her chair. In that pocket she kept leaves of dried tobacco. She smoked a clay pipe with a long cane stem in it. She'd reach into that pocket, get her some dry crumbs of tobacco, put 'em in her pipe and pack the pipe full. Then she'd take her little fire shovel and reach into her fire and get her a little live coal. She'd put that coal on top of that tobacco in her pipe, take a few puffs, get the tobacco lit good, and she'd put the coal back in the fireplace. She'd sit there and smoke that pipe and talk to you if you wanted to talk. That was a real pioneer home."
I like this not because it is quaint or nostalgic, but because it captures the ritual of pipe smoking.

My wife had a good set of Foxfires collected over several years, but being warm-hearted, she loaned it to a friend with all assurances, many years ago, and we are still waiting. She loaned her childhood clarinet to a neighbor girl on Long Island, who played in school orchestras for years, and a few years ago, her mom mailed it back, and I had it reconditioned for her. My wife loaned her grandmother's handmade cookbook to a colleague who likewise never returned it, a lost family legacy -- to me a high crime. I hope there is some horrific story about how the colleagues life came apart in riots and explosions, to explain this.

seldom has it about right. I think it started out as a one semester or one-year project, and when the project drew interest, it became a regular publication for quite a while. They had the writing talent and the people power of the students. The combination of connecting with older people and the rural isolation of the area made it a pretty good window back to the Nineteenth Century. My wife felt a connection having grown up in fairly remote rural Missouri with a grandma who lived to age 99 and actually traveled west in a Conestoga (or some kind of...) covered wagon, and lived in a sod house until the family proudly was able to build a brick house.