It is three in the morning and there are two women in that room who are not kin to the sick woman in the bed. One is awake and one is asleep on the floor waiting her turn. Nobody sent for them and nobody is paying them. 🕯️ Sitting up was one of the strongest obligations in these mountains, and it worked like a rota that nobody ever wrote down. When somebody in a community took seriously ill, word went along the creek, and from that night until the person recovered or died, that house was never without women in it. They came in pairs and they came in shifts. They watched through the night so the family could sleep. They kept the fire, kept water going, changed bedding, cooled fevers, dosed what there was to dose, and sat. And they did the rest of it too. Somebody was always cooking, because a house with a sick person in it stops functioning. Somebody took the washing home. Somebody took the younger children to their own house for a week. A woman would walk in, look around, and start doing whatever she found undone without asking permission, because asking would have made it a favour and it was not a favour. Here is what makes it more than kindness. There was no hospital within reach for most of these families, and often no doctor who could come and stay. Nursing was the entire treatment. Whether somebody lived through pneumonia or typhoid very often came down to whether there was a person awake in that room at four in the morning. 🏡 So the women of a community were, functionally, the health care system, unpaid, unlicensed, on call for life. And it was reciprocal without ever being accounted. You sat up for them because they would sit up for you, and everybody knew that without a word. Somebody sat up with your great grandmother. There is no record of her name anywhere.