Many of us are captivated by the aura of nostalgia, constantly reflecting on the way “things used to be.” We spend our time often idealizing the past, wishing some aspects of it could come back to us. Particularly here in the Northern Neck, we think of olden times when our near-insular isolation from the rest of the Commonwealth and the country led to certain habits and traits that regrettably have passed into history.
Karen Harcum has refuted that decline by living a life typical of the best of what has gone before us. She is quite up-to-date and current, using all modern conveniences, but she also goes back to former times as well. She and her husband, Curly, a native son of Weems, committed matrimony in 1976, and then moved to Richmond where they raised their daughters and spent their professional careers, but in retirement the lore of the Northern Neck drew them back to their roots.
They built a home on family farmland up the road from her ancestral Conley Century Farm and began reliving the wonderful experiences associated with our traditional rural lifestyle. For his part Curly maintains a lawn that only can be described as “manicured.” I like to tell him that driving down the road, sometimes I can count up to three blades of grass not at regulation length.
In their backyard, between their house and the field that is farmed by Karen’s brother, Steve Conley, is situated their fenced garden, every plant and germinated seed of which Curly has in perfect alignment. When the plants produce and the harvest comes in, Karen begins the process of preserving the food, in which activity she particularly reflects her Northern Neck heritage.
She learned her culinary skills from her mother, Hazel Conley, and her canning does not begin when the fruits and vegetables are ripe, but rather carries on all through the year, gathering and washing jars and lids while getting ready for the implementation of the home production line. Karen does not use recipes, instead she continues the passed along practices of her forebearers. She has the knack of putting items together that she knows will “get along well” in the canning jars.
This time of year, when speaking with Karen, one tries to absorb the magnitude of how many pounds or baskets of green beans or tomatoes that she and Curly have raised and how many jars of their resulting bounty she has processed. Home canning and food preserving were taken for granted as simply being what one did in the Northern Neck in years a gone by, but today the skillsets have been lost to such an extent that Virginia Cooperative Extension has been offering classes for newcomers and latter-generation natives to learn the time-honored traditions associated with food preservation. In those classes, Karen could be a professor.
Another of Karen’s talents lies in her ability to sew. For years she made beautiful cross-stitch embroidery which she gave as Christmas presents. Like her mother before her, she can make simple pieces of cloth take on new life and charm through the use of her needle.
Karen and Curly keep alive the old ways of living in the Northern Neck, and not merely nostalgically, but vibrantly as well. To know them is to understand the dynamism of our traditions and to experience two Northern Neck Originals.
This coming Monday, Karen will become a septuagenarian. Perhaps this column will afford her a brief respite from the canning process, if not, she can get to it after the first frost.
Happy Birthday, Karen! You are at the Peak of Youth!
