Don’t git above your raisin’ . . .
Everything comes full circle . . .
Stand up for yourself . . .
Everybody walks according to their lights . . . (Old grandma sayings)
As I write, it is Epiphany Eve. Tomorrow, Epiphany, January 6th, twelve days after Christmas, is the time when the Christian story recognizes the actual arrival of the three wise men who visited Jesus, bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
My mom frequently talked about her Granny Smith, her great-great-grandmother, who came over from the Old Country (Ireland). Granny Smith was a midwife, delivering countless babies, and a “granny-witch,” which in those days meant she was a wise old woman who had the knowledge of “doctoring” with herbs and was respected as a healer by her community.
Granny Smith seemed to be a bright spot in the midst of some other more questionable relatives about whom I would hear stories. As a child, the image of Granny Smith that stuck in my mind was that of a jolly and generous and independent old lady who “rode her horse down the road to see us with a saddlebag full of apples.” And Granny Smith celebrated Old Christmas, on January 6th, the end of our traditional twelve days of Christmas, as did many of the early Appalachian mountain people, a throwback to their custom of adhering to the older Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar, which arrived in the British Isles around 1750 or so.
Amyway, the thought of a happy-go-lucky Irish grandma undergoing an arduous ocean voyage to this country, and then trekking southward across the wildness of what this country must have been like in the mid-1700s — to eventually settle in these ancient Appalachian Mountains where she made a life for herself and her family — and then eventually bringing gifts of apples for the little girl who was my mom — to finally linger in my own awareness as an icon-ish wise old woman — pleases me as another image of the Three Wise Men of our traditional Christmas story.
In Parts One and Two of Journey of the Magi, I offered some other images and thoughts about these wise men and their journey, but the one of canny, and doubtlessly clever, and very, very courageous old Granny Smith is my favorite.
Maybe wise men and women come in a lot of different guises. And always bearing gifts for us of some sort . . .