Halloween.

Chester’s Gotcha Day.

I took the day off to celebrate the latter. I detest Halloween. But I do enjoy seeing the fun costumes. And I ain’t gonna turn down a Reese’s Cup, pumpkin or bats or standard shape, I have no preference.

So we’ve had the bacon and fried taters, he’s opened his four presents, representing one for each of his years here (although I’m sure he would have preferred the number in dog years equivalent), we’ve been to Chickalay for the requisite fluff cup and nuggets, and have napped in between all activities.

Although it was over 80 degrees today, the breeze is cool, more so because I’m in the shade. But I’m watching the chickens wade through the fallen leaves from my formerly showy sugar maple. They’re all so unique in color and patterns. I find their gentle clucking therapeutic. I was never permitted to have chickens, I don’t remember the reasoning. Prolly ‘cause I’d cry myself dehydrated when the hawk made a meal of one of them. And in my family, we revere hawks and other wildlife above domesticated animals.

‘Cept groundhogs. They never were tolerated. It was the holes they dug, they’d hobble a horse or kill a cow.

There’s a ball game tonight. There’s a ball game most nights. I don’t mind the noise, people are having fun and united, politics hopefully a long way from their thoughts. The band could be better, though. I can smell the popcorn, strangely enough.

Halloween. I don’t know that there’s ever been a single trick or treater to visit this house, apart from me and my cousins. Of course not in recent years, when I’ve kept the gate closed and a toothy dog on patrol. I thought I’d selected a spooky book to read this week, but it’s just a variation of Where the Crawdads Sing. I don’t mind it. Midnight is the Darkest Hour by Ashley Winstead, if you’re so inclined to join me. It’s about a little backwater town in Southern Louisiana and the hypocritical souls who live there. I don’t know why anyone expects the truth from anybody else when they lie to their own self.

Maybe rain tomorrow. I’m glad I got gas today. I detest pumping gas in the rain. I’d like to stay home again tomorrow, but that’s just my laziness talkin’. Besides, I’m not sure Jake is capable of showing up two days in a row. It remains to be seen if he was even there today. He wasn’t at 9:30, according to Sam, who swung by for his retirement gift.

It makes me wonder what his dream job is. What is he good at? Not being on time, that’s a fact. Not paperwork of any kind. Not chewing quietly or blowing his nose or washing his hands. I guess he likes running equipment. And drinking beer. I can’t fault him for the beer.

What do any of us want to be, truly? I say I’d like to be an author, but I don’t know that that’s true. There would be criticism from all sides. People disagreeing with whatever subject you write about, any sort of opinion expressed, accusations that you drew from their life experiences, not your own. Look at Sean Dietrich. I would call him successful, and optimistic as anybody around. And he catches all kinds of flack.

I ain’t built for that. Not to just sit there and take it, anyway. Email is free, but Allegiant offers a lot of $99 flights. Prolly wouldn’t do for me to get hate mail.

Still I look to find a reason to believe, as Rod Stewart sang. You gotta believe in something or you’d never do anything. That’s why I can’t understand how atheists can face another day. Life is too hard to go at it with no hope for a better tomorrow.

Love from Appalachia,

~Amy

Friends, Americans, Countrymen, lend me your eyes.

Thanks to all the loyal readers and friends who have reached out to me in the last several months, checking to make sure everything was okay. It wasn’t, but it was. Nothing to alarm anybody about. Some of my undoing was my own doing, some of it wasn’t. It was a trifecta of loss, two friends and a leg injury got me down just as spring was cranking to full throttle. As I said on this day in 2021, life will kick you in the teeth time and time again but I just picture myself crawling to my knees, bloodied and disheveled, motioning for more, and grinning madly.
Because weakness is fear. And I ain’t skeert.

You ever win one of those goldfish at the fair? Like, when you weren’t even trying to win a goldfish, you were going for bragging rights against an old high school nemesis, or maybe the carnies offered some grand cash prize. But carnivals are twisted, and you have not a snowflake’s chance in the Sahara of winning what you really want.

And you’re presented this sad little goldfish in its tiny plastic bag. If you’re unlucky, and the goldfish has a supernatural will to survive, it makes it through the jostling of the carnival, staring out and swimming madly but going nowhere, until you make it home and dump it in an old vase filled with chlorinated water straight from the tap.

Then your children fight about who’s gonna feed it for the first two or three days and maybe they overfeed it. Maybe the goldfish dies and it was a short lived memory of a pet you can use as an example of why they’re not responsible enough to have a puppy.

I’m off track. So the goldfish is unhappy in its unnatural habitat. You can spend a lot of money making things nice for the goldfish: getting him a filter and some real plants and one of those trunks that open and close, aerating the water. You may clean his vessel three times a day, making the glass sparkle and gleam. However, the goldfish longs for the stagnant pond with his friends and this one other goldfish he swam around eating the same larvae with, whom he had his tiny heart set on. Where what he could see was his for the taking, not unattainable, not a life outside his own. The goldfish remembers freedom.

So now you’re the owner of something you don’t want, that you’re holding on to out of obligation because you won it. You bested the system and got your prize that you’re seeing is no prize at all. You could turn the goldfish loose in a stream, or take it to a friend who has a pond. But no. You’re gonna see this goldfish through to the end because it’s your goldfish. You might fool yourself into thinking you’re doing the goldfish a favor, you’re saving it from cold weather and the predators of the world, like snapping turtles, bullfrogs, and those goofy long necked birds. You tell yourself the goldfish has a great life, protected and well fed. You even trick yourself into thinking you care about the little guy, that it’s nice to come home and see him there, always there.

But the goldfish remembers days before the square glass box. The goldfish remembers long happy days, swimming for hours and never encountering an obstacle he couldn’t swim around. And now the goldfish is so despondent he lays at the bottom of his prison, color fading, until one day the little fish becomes fish food.

And you wonder why you confined another animal for so long, limiting its life to the minuscule environment you controlled. It didn’t contribute to your happiness much in any way, you saw the little fish as one more thing to look after, to clean up after, every day.

All because you had to win the ring toss, when you really only wanted the cash prize.

I have held up my promise to myself, my New Year’s Resolution, for writing every day. There were days I skipped, but I came back to fill in. There were times I could only write a paragraph. But it was all so close to my heart I couldn’t put it out there for public consumption. But I’m taking my life back, I’m not letting anything else happen TO me. I’m not protecting myself by withdrawing. I’m not waiting around on something to happen. I suffered through much of spring and all of summer, and now I’m not wasting any more time. We don’t even know if we have it to waste. I’m not trapped like a goldfish from the fair. I can swim anywhere I choose. I can eat more than rainbow fish flakes. I can make new friends while hanging with the old. Life is too short to live it in limbo. Don’t wait for anything, and don’t EVER put your key to happiness in anybody else’s pocket.

Get a dog instead.

Love from Appalachia,

~Amy

It’s raining again.
A week ago, we’d have been jumping for joy. Today, we quiver and pray.
I see that TVA has declared the Nolichucky River flood a “one in 5,000 years flood event”. And I guess that’s good.
I don’t know how people can sit on Facebook day in and day out, looking at all the trauma that unfolds across the world. I have been inundated with information for three days straight now and it’s proving to take a toll on my mental well being (some probably question how well it was to start with).
Wednesday was downpour day for us in Sevierville. I had a bit of excitement getting through Frog Alley, but that was the extent of it. Thursday was more rain, but nothing unusual, really. Perhaps for the time of year. And all these warnings coming out about not traveling Friday unless it was critical. Schools were closed. We scoffed. All for some rain.
And “some rain” is all Sevierville and my neck of the woods got.
But just two counties away, upstate….
Unicoi.
Greene.
And our neighbors In Cocke County, with little warning after Hartford Dam failed and downtown filled with water. Scary situation to see inmates being marched through downtown clutching their bedding.
One of my board members lives in Cosby. He’s at a bit of a loss. Cosby ain’t got squat to speak of, they have to pipe the sunshine in, so Newport is where he goes for his groceries, his medicine, his funeral home, his barbershop, his fast food, his florist for funerals. Many times you can’t get into Sevierville (forget Gatlinburg, who wants to go there, anyway?), it’s quicker to go to Hot Springs- that’s where his preferred pizza joint was.
Was.
One of my board members lives on the river. He’d just sowed down his riverbottom in fresh new grass seed.
I guess somebody will appreciate that down around Memphis, maybe.
One board member knew of 16 acres of soybeans under 8″ of water.
I spent the first three hours of my day on the phone, calling clients I first met through the Co-op. They were all upbeat and optimistic and glad to be thought of. One was mourning the loss of some very old trees. One was laughing about his boat and boat dock that was ripped from shore by a passing tree, and promptly sunk. One just wanted to talk awhile while he watched it rain some more.
I drove to the dam at midday, naïvely thinking it would be nearly deserted at that hour. No, there was a line of cars making their way through the drizzling rain and fog up the hill. We parked and got out and stood and watched with others who had driven from wherever to witness the spectacle of 450,000 gallons of water PER SECOND rush and fall through the eleven old concrete gates into the turbulent churning muddy water heading downriver, on to Knoxville and beyond.
There were locals and transplants and hispanics and Orientals and tourists (literally “dam Yankees”, as one friend so astutely described). There was an anchorman and videographer for the national news. We were all there just to see a bunch of water move. We were there to say we saw a part of history being made. TVA could be called a curse…but this weekend I think most of us will agree they were a blessing.
You can’t truly predict the weather. Man likes to think they can but they get it wrong all the time. I reckon the mountains don’t make it easy. They don’t make anything easy. People have always lived a hardscrabble life in these hills, eeking out a living the best way they know how. In Coal Miner’s Daughter, Dooley says, “In Kentucky, you got three choices: coal mine, moonshine, or move it on down the line.”
And that’s why we build by creeks. Because it’s easier (and cheaper) to get water when you’re close to it already. And for anybody who has never visited our beloved Appalachia: creeks, rivers, and lakes are found in abundance. You’re bound to be building right alongside some body of water, or crossing one to get there. Count the bridges you cross on your daily travels tomorrow. You’ll have to really pay attention, because I bet you never even think about them anymore. 30″ of rain in three days on steep mountains with 80 mile an hour winds…well, ain’t nothin’ gonna hold long.
Except one little dam built in 1912.
And so. While the nation ridicules our southern accents and our ignorance for better preparation, be that what it may, let this redneck mountain girl say she’s proud to be from here and thankful to have been spared yet again.
Please pray and help Unicoi County any way you can. They are truly devastated and I will say for the fiftieth time: they didn’t have much to begin with. They will have the hardest time, I believe. Banner Elk and Asheville are wealthy. Many towns over that way are. Erwin is dirt poor. And digging out from that dirt is a greater challenge than I can begin to imagine.
There’s need on every corner. You don’t have to look far. And there’s hope in the eyes of almost every one of us. The Nolichucky Dam taught us to believe, to stand strong, and know help is coming but you gotta hang tough as long as you can.
Love to all my Mountain Strong warriors. Prayers for more faith to see you through another day.
Goodnight from Amy’s Appalachia.