MY FATHER'S ANVIL

by Danna Shirley

Do you ever not notice something that’s been around for years, sitting over in the corner collecting dust, well-used but of no interest to you?  I’m sure I would have known what it was called, an anvil; and maybe I would have known its purpose, but my eyes were on other things…always more important things in my life at any given time.

Many years later on one of my visits home I spied the old anvil sitting on a stump out in the yard near my father’s workshop.  I casually asked Pa where he had gotten it and when he told me it was his grandfather’s, I began to have a new-found interest in this implement.

Abe Goines, his Grandpa, had brought it with him from Tennessee to his new home in Spiro, Oklahoma.  Pa didn’t know when exactly, just that it had been in the family that long.  It later was handed down to his father, Big Pop, who moved it to Arkansas, along with his family, around 1930. 

Pa remembered as a little boy turning the blower to heat the plowshares, while Big Pop held the blades with tongs and beat it with the hammer to sharpen them on the old anvil.  The blades had to be razor-sharp to cut through the grass roots and persimmon sprouts that hindered the plow from cutting deep and true.  Pa was a dependable and faithful worker on the farm but he made no bones about letting Big Pop know that when he was grown, he would be gone.  Farm life was not the life for him.

Big Pop died a young man under a bogged down tractor that had flipped over in the mud.  It was his fifty-first birthday.  Our family drove from California to Arkansas for the funeral. 

Years later Pa’s brother, Jerrell, asked him if he wanted the old anvil.  It was 1980, it weighed 80 pounds, and Pa drove it back to California where it now sits on the stump out near the shop, no longer used to sharpen plowshares, but it still has a purpose.  Pa is a master restorer of antique cars.  It seems like a good marriage…the old anvil holding the old car parts, both from the same era.

          I have a new appreciation for this family heirloom and I’ve asked Pa to tell whoever gets the anvil, to please keep it in the family.  It would be nice to have it someday, to bring it back to its roots, back to Tennessee.

July, 2005