Warsh Rags

     I've run across a relic from my childhood: warsh rags.

     A friend arranged it. He sent me a magazine article on Appalachian vernacular and its Celtic origins.

     My mother's family were not mountain people. They were hard-scrabble farmers in the sandy flats of eastern North Carolina. But folks out there shared in the Celtic coloring of language and attitudes in the mid-South.

     Curdled milk was clabber (and it made fantastic biscuits).  Objects at a certain distance were yonder.  An uncle who sometimes was afeared shared the word with Shakespeare. Whiskey was -- well, whiskey.  And in one strong Celtic tradition, a fellow might defiantly make his own in a far corner of the woods.
     The manners, language and rich accents of the region were the norms of my first years. Then, life journeys took me elsewhere.
      In the industrial Northeast, speech seemed a form of aggression. In the upper Midwest it was, to my ear, plain as a washed-out shirt.
     In New England, the personality of language once again had charm. I did have to learn that bring meant take, and rob meant steal. If I wanted a milkshake, I had to order a frappe. If I wanted to offer someone a soft drink, I'd suggest a tonic.
       But as travel for work and play took me to the west coast, the great plains and more,  it often seemed that other parts of the country were tone deaf to the music of English.
        Some of this attitude is mere prejudice, of course -- a preference for my own traditions.  Another part is the regret of loss. On the streets of my town nowadays you'll hear as much California and New York as Carolina. You'll also hear colorless, homeless hybrids.
     The loss has other tokens, too. Up in the hills, ski resorts and golf courses pock slopes of rhododendron and mountain laurel. Down in the flatlands, my grandparents' modest farm has become a small suburban office park.
     Deeper thinkers might here elaborate on cycles of change. They would note that, in homogenizing language, time dims memories of cultural heritage.  In the matter of language at hand, time steadily removes a living artifact of our country's inheritance from  Elizabethans and their forebears. One day, the record will exist only in libraries.
     But we don't need deep thinking to know that we can regret the loss imposed by change without imagining to avoid it.  For my own part, I even get a little chuckle when I wonder how long it would take me these days to find someone who still knows that a croker sack is a burlap bag, or that a stob is a wooden stake.
     And tomorrow morning, when I wash my face, I will remember all the years when I would have called the cloth a warsh rag.
      Knowing that time works upon everyone, I'll also be aware that a day will come when that image won't recur, even to me.