Memories of my grandfather's Sawyer brothers and sisters are fixed in one spot - the farm house near the Nolichucky River their parents, Gee & Catherine Conway Sawyer built. As a girl I would sit on the floor or the porch steps as they rocked and laughed and told stories of long ago frolics. As I grew up we gathered there for weddings, birthdays, reunions and funerals. My children slept upstairs in the rooms the aunts and uncles had occupied 90 years earlier - probably in the same beds.
That house in Warrensburg is my home place - the spot were I feel most connected with my Tennessee family and history.
The family sold the house and farm after the last aunt died. Since then I've carried the home place with us as we've moved. Catherine's milk pitcher (filled with sea glass from Cape Cod) is in the living room. Gee's powder horn and shoe forms sit on the family room bookshelves. Quilts the aunts made are in the guest room.
But my favorite piece of my Sawyer home is the pie safe Catherine's father, Porter Conway, made for her when she was married in 1886. Aunt Mary Kathryn gave it to me a couple years before she died. Bless station wagons. I piled the luggage on the car seats with the children and put the safe in the back, wrapped in blankets. We drove home to Michigan where it sat in our family room filled with cookbooks and table linens. Today it's in our kitchen in Missouri. Someday it will be in my daughter's home.
It's a primitive oak cupboard and more than well used. No original patina here. It was painted, stained, stripped and repainted more times than I could ever count. The hinges were replaced when the doors fell off (ten children raiding a pie safe will do that) and fake wood knobs were added at some point. I hate them and keep meaning to replace them with something fun or funky. Odds are my daughter, like her great great-aunts Selma and Mary Kathryn, will paint it when it becomes hers. As she should. She remembers Mary Kathryn and while her memories and feelings about the home place are far different from mine, she still hears the Tennessee voices in her head.
