Nina's Blog

Summing Up 2018

5/20/2019

Happy Holidays 2018!

Along with Dean’s sister Martha, and a good friend named Hazel, I (Nina) am a reader. We all three subscribe to some of the bargain book sites and pore over their emails. The result is that Martha and I, being short on willpower, have down-loaded between 500 and a thousand books to our e-readers. (Hazel has more willpower and better sense.) Considering our age and that inventory, and counting library check-outs, accumulated purchased hardcovers and paperbacks, etc., there is clearly not enough lifetime left to get through even the e-reader bunch. That has led me to wonder if one can bequeath ebooks as one can printed books. Clearly, it’s possible to will away the whole reader, but what about individual titles? There are unexpected challenges in the electronic world.

The other day, I explored further on Amazon for a book I'd seen a recommendation on, set in Colorado in the 1800s. (The period and location grabbed me.) It even had good reviews. But when I "looked inside" (bless Amazon), I was appalled by the first couple of pages. The novel was set at about the time of the closing of Fort Collins, which is no longer a fort but survives as a town in northeast Colorado. The characters were questioning why the War Department was closing the Fort, since the two recent Apache attacks they'd fought off showed it was still needed. That did it. Apache attacks? In northern Colorado? I know the Apache were fierce, but they lived mostly in Southern Arizona and Mexico. I would believe Shoshone or Arapaho or Cheyenne. I would have bought Blackfeet, although they are a tad north. I’d have bought Ute, although they are more southern Colorado. I might even have swallowed Comanche, since they were a horse people and it’s at least conceivable they could have made it that far, although god knows why they would try. But Apache? I promptly closed the "Look Inside" window, signed off Amazon, and went off to sulk about the sad state of literature these days.

One of our plagues this spring was that our printer died. The best replacement choice at our local Walmart, which provides not just our upscale but only shopping here, was a Canon, so we bought it. We couldn't install it. I (Nina) called Canon, and they couldn't install it. The usual ensued. Five days of back and forth, ending with a chat during which they and I gave up all hope. As I closed the chat window, a survey popped asking how the chat had gone. I gave them a zero rating, and a candid exposition of my five days with one or the other of them, including 7 hours with them the day before. As Mark Twain said of one of his characters in Roughing It, I used both the words and the music. I finished by telling them I’d be returning this Canon printer and never coming near another. I invited them to discuss this with me.

It wasn't five minutes before the phone was ringing. Not just Canon, but the head of engineering. He asked if I would be willing to let them try again, and I told them I'd give them an hour and a half. And, between a lapsed physicist and Canon’s head engineer working together, we did get it printing in an hour and a half. I know you stopped reading when you first hit the word “printer,” but I gave you more so you will be aware installing a printer can take five days and eight people, but Canon evidently will stick with you.

This year (or really over the 2017-2018 winter), we finally bit the bullet and redid the kitchen in Alaska, which I’d been threatening for many years. We decided on an over-the-winter overhaul while we were snow-birding in Kentucky to avoid the demolition, debris, lack of plumbing, etc. We emptied the kitchen down to bare surfaces, stowed the packed boxes in the bedroom, turned keys over to the contractor, and took off to the Lower 48.

Over the winter, Dean’s sister Martha told our joint nephew Don (Florida, and also redoing his kitchen) that I was redoing the Alaska kitchen from 5000 miles away, and he expressed what I am going to interpret as amazement, but may have been astonishment that I had lost my mind last summer and he had not heard until last week.

(That nephew, by the way, got married this year. When the news reached me of the engagement, I immediately launched congratulations to Don and felicitations to his affianced, since Emily Post or Miss Marple or somebody says one never congratulates the bride, only the groom, and I don't want to lose my position in the Prissy Society, where I am not only currently in good standing but an officer.)

Because of Alaska prices, I decided to go with IKEA cabinets, about a quarter the cost, but unassembled. IKEA doesn’t ship to Alaska, so I had to find a freight forwarder in Seattle who’d load them on a ship and ferry them across the North Pacific to Anchorage. Lots of opportunities for trauma, and there was some. I discovered I had THREE pallets of HUNDREDS OF BOXES that might, someday, by dint of contractor magic, become an assembled kitchen. We cleared a place in the living room to stack them and ended with a stack eight feet long, four feet deep, and four feet high, weighing 3000 pounds. Later, Dean confided to me that he had thought to himself, “There’s no way anybody can make anything out of this that makes sense.”

I was a little nervous myself, and not just about the assemble-and-install part. When we redid the kitchen in Kentucky, I knew it would be beautiful and it is. But I was nervous as a cat about this one. I chose black cabinets, white counters/back-splash, and a terra cotta tile floor and terra-cotta-colored end wall. I lived in fear that it would look like I chose a Hallowe’en color scheme. My contractor, who clearly was doubtful, ratcheted up my fear, but he sounded like the type that only likes white walls, so I tried to discount him. (He did come around later.)

It took three months beyond our normal return date before we had working plumbing and wiring up there, so we were very late returning. We missed sockeye salmon opening day on the Russian River, the first time in lo-these-many-years. But we got a kitchen. And it turned out very well. We got enough compliments that we decided to enter a periodic contest run by a magazine called Alaska’s Best Kitchens. They called to break the news to us that only kitchens designed by professionals were eligible. But, they went on tell us they loved the kitchen so much they were going to feature it in the magazine anyway. They’ve photographed and interviewed, but we don’t yet have a publication date. On grounds that they will publish eventually, we have been walking around with our heads so swelled up there’d hardly be room to pass each other in a concert hall. If you see two people who look like the Hindenburg on legs, that might be us.

Right before we headed off to Alaska to greet the new kitchen, we finished a documentary called Chair Caning and Storytelling. KET, our state PBS affiliate, was kind enough to pick it up, and it has run several times. It will air again on KET-KY on the 19th of this month at 4:30 pm. If you are not in KET’s broadcast range but would like to see it, you can find it, along with our other two PBS documentaries, on YouTube. Just google Youtube Dean Cornett. It was a fun project, because we got to go out in the woods and film our Appalachian caners felling a hickory and stripping the bark to make the chair seat. Fascinating and a real skill, besides hard work.

This fall, our alma mater, Berea College, christened a new science building, and were kind enough to invite us to attend. A lot more modern than the old science building I took classes and labs in, and a nice trip.

And last but not least, ###EARTHQUAKE###. Specifically, the magnitude 7 Alaska earthquake around 30 November which was centered practically under our place in Anchorage. You may have seen the TV coverage showing roads wrenched apart or subsided into holes. It didn’t do our place any good either. We were by this time snow-birded in Kentucky, but friends and neighbors checked the damage for us. A glass-topped table in the foyer fell and shattered into a jillion pieces. A big bookcase which was screwed into the wall nevertheless worked loose and is occupying the center of the bedroom floor. There are books scattered everywhere there, in the living room, and in the kitchen. Our TV is face down on the floor, and every surface that held something is now clear and the somethings are on the floor. But, no windows are broken. No cracks in walls and ceilings. No broken water pipes. No broken gas pipes. So (pending the thaw and what that might reveal about the roof), no structural damage. We were lucky.

That’s our year. Hope you had a good one and will have a better 2019.

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Summing Up 2017

5/20/2019

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Happy Holidays!
Here on the fourth of December, the Aristocrat pear trees along Main Street and in the Blackey Park are still fully clothed in autumn gold, coral, and russet, a testament to days in the sixties down in town, in spite of a half-dozen hard frosts up where we perch in the fold of a mountain above town. Not for long, though. A front will push in rain and wind tomorrow, followed by a week of highs in the thirties and forties. We suspect tomorrow’s wind will blow off the pears’ gorgeous dresses and leave naked limbs.

A few days ago, we switched the 5’x8’ flag in the park for a 6’x10’ size. The park flagpole is tall and strong and cried out for a bigger flag. Now that it’s up, we’re eager to see some wind to watch the flag loft and stand from the flagpole. Tomorrow may be our chance. We walk in the park six days a week, and tomorrow I think we’ll tote the camera along in hopes of capturing the new flag aloft and flying.

Our second park effort was seeding to replace grass that died atop the flag knoll while we were in Alaska, an effort which involved laborious watering (laborious because we had to carry the water down from our house daily in gallon jugs, since the park lacks a water source). Impatient with the response, we not only toted water but also fertilized generously. The grass then took off at an insane gallop and hasn’t looked back. We’ve had to mow it five times in the last four weeks and we look to be facing weekly mowings right through the snow.

Since the park often suffers while we’re not here, the seeding, watering, and fertilizing are not new. What is new is the walnut factor. The park sports a big old walnut tree, which most years yields prolifically. I (Nina) haven’t gathered walnuts for more than 50 years, but this fall mended my ways. I gathered nearly every walnut that fell and hulled them, taking care to wear gloves. (Those who’ve ever hulled walnuts will understand why. Walnut hull stains last for weeks, scrub ye no matter how much.) Then I spread them to dry. I’ve been dreading the cracking and nutmeat extracting process, since black walnuts are the very devil to entice from the shell. Last week, I took my hammer and a dozen or so walnuts out to a huge rock beside the house and sat down on it to reacquaint myself. The cracking with a hammer was a little easier than I remembered. Kind of a simple lots-of-force process. But the nutmeat extraction was harder than I recalled. The initial breach didn’t by any means open the walnut enough. I then got to choose winkling the walnut meat out using a dental pick or using the hammer again. Since it’s hard to know exactly how much force is needed to crack an already cracked walnut just enough more, I usually ended by smashing the shell and the nutmeat, leaving lots of tiny, flat, granular snacks for the chipmunk who owns the rock. So now I use a three-stage process: Use hammer for initial breach, apply needle nose pliers to the inside to break the chambers, and dental pick the nuts. Since I’ll probably only have time and endurance to crack maybe two dozen at a time, any nice day this winter you’ll probably find me on the rock sometime during daylight.

Last year the weather was our big enemy. This year we were subjected to insect attacks. Coordinated. En masse. Evil and vicious. Two separate invasions.
This past spring, we found ourselves engaged in a mortal battle with fruit flies. They started showing up in frightening numbers, and we had no clue where they were coming from. No half-hearted attack; their infestation worsened daily. The fruit-fly population began to remind me of mosquitos in the most infested parts of Alaska, which in numbers will nearly drive a victim crazy, even a head-netted victim. (If you’ve seen video of caribou snorting and shaking, and seeking windy places to avoid mosquitoes, then you know.) I (Nina) could sympathize because I was beginning to develop some definite crazy from the fruit flies.

After two or three days of a worsening problem, I decided I had to do something. I started casing the kitchen for the source. I found it when I shifted a pineapple that was ripening next to the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter. As I joggled it, a dense black cloud of fruit flies lifted off and spread around the kitchen. Then they separated into tribes with their own territories. There was the refrigerator tribe, the wine rack tribe, the cabinet-front tribe, and so on. If I sneaked up and slapped at a few on the refrigerator, they would all lift off, but instead of fleeing to the wine-rack, they would fly around until they could land on the refrigerator again, where they seemed to engage in colloquies. I began to suspect them of convening parliaments and electing leaders.

We got rid of the pineapple, but saved a little of the fruit and a lot of the juice for traps. I (Nina) figured that if they liked pineapple that much, we could weaponize it. So, for more than a week, we set out bottles with pineapple juice and bits in the bottom. When enough flies accumulated inside and on the rim, we slammed the lid on the bottles and treated the flies inside to a pineapple tsunami. Once they all drowned, we set the traps out again. Eventually we could see the proverbial end-of-the-tunnel light, and finally the invasion ended. But I haven’t dared to buy a pineapple since, despite an overweening fondness for them.

The entomology kingdom invaded again after we came down to Kentucky in the Autumn. Not fruit flies this time: Yellowjackets! We discovered a colony had set up housekeeping inside the front wall of the house, one whose members were entering and leaving in large numbers just a foot or so from the door. A large army of yellow jackets next to your front door is nothing to feel complacent about, so we jumped on the problem. We stopped up their entry hole and sprayed the area around their entrance and egress with wasp spray so those outside the walls couldn’t get back inside.

Unfortunately, that also discouraged the ones already inside the walls (a fully generous number, we regrettably learned) from exiting, at least to the outside. Instead, swarms started showing up in our living room. After days of chasing them down by the numbers and killing them, accompanied by several stings apiece, Dean finally tracked down their entry. We have wall baseboard heaters and the wires, as is usual, run inside the walls. EXCEPT of course where the wires exit through the sheetrock and connect to the back of the heater on the living room wall. Apparently, the vicious little devils found that hole, which their nest must be right behind, and poured out through it into the living room. We are fortunate that they mostly headed straight for the windows, where we were able to smash them against the glass, though not without risk and stress. It is unrestful to jump up every couple of minutes to combat a new group. Also unrestful to endure stings (three each for carelessness) and lots of yellowjacket parts smeared on the window glass. We lived in dread that they might invade other rooms, especially our bedroom, so we had to make rounds every night before bed to eliminate strays. For unknown reasons, they didn’t seem to come out of the nest at night. Maybe an entomologist would know why; we just thanked our lucky stars. We know the solution is to take the heater off the wall so we can get to that opening and seal thoroughly around the wires, but don’t feel safe doing that so long as living yellowjackets may be poised on the nest waiting to fly sorties in revenge. Maybe in the depths of January after several hard freezes?

We spent a good part of the early months of this year cleaning up from the legal case, which finally ended in January with a judgment against the person charged with taking our timber. It took about five months after the judgment before the paperwork was finished. Innocents that we were, we just assumed that getting a judgment meant maybe two weeks until we'd seen the last of it. Not so. Not even two months. Maybe not two years. We still don't have all the money, and had to file judgment liens in several counties as the first step in collecting the balance. Meanwhile, he is in federal prison, not because of our timber but because he was bilking the IRS big time. That case went to trial last year and he was convicted, so he will be serving 30 months as the guest of the federal government, while we will fall in line behind the IRS in collecting, so nothing is ever simple. We do feel some satisfaction for sticking out the thirteen years this dragged on and winning.

I (Nina) may have mentioned my ambition to redo the kitchen in the Anchorage, Alaska condo. Summer before last, I had a design which I loved but which required moving walls, rewiring, shifting plumbing, and a whole host of other things. When I got bids, though, we were looking at $80,000, which you could buy a whole house for in Kentucky, and it would have a good-sized lot and at least two baths. I loved that design, which connected the kitchen to the entry foyer and opened it to the living room, but I knew we could never recoup half the cost at a sale, and we would never use the place long enough to recoup it in enjoyment, so I decided it made no sense to go forward. But I am back at it again, this time leaving wiring and walls (except for soffits, which I want gone) untouched. Mostly I'm planning new cabinets, counters, and floor. Meanwhile, I've had a ball using Computer-Aided Design to plan multiple new versions of the kitchen and the two baths.

That’s our year. We hope you had a good one in 2017 and will have a better one next year.

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Summing Up 2016

12/10/2016

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Happy Holidays!!

Before we get into our year, we’d like to ask those who receive this Christmas update a favor. Pro bono, we have developed a website for the Letcher County, Kentucky, Planning Commission that describes the good things about Letcher County. Its purpose is to bring tourism, retirees, and jobs to Letcher County by making the nation aware of county assets. You will find it here (or directly at www.whyletchercounty.org). The trick, of course, is how to assure that people from elsewhere find the site. We would greatly appreciate your help in getting the word out, sharing the site on your Facebook page, and so on. And we would appreciate any feedback from you on how to make the site more effective.

Now to our year:
It tells you something about the general dullness of our life when the most exciting things that happened to us this past year were weather-related. Especially when the latest event was waking up to rain, to mixed thrills and relief. The southeast has been in a drought all autumn, moving up the scale from minor to moderate to severe to extreme to extraordinary. For the first time I can remember, the humidity was so low (sometimes down in the 20% range) that there wasn’t enough moisture to produce our standard fall morning fogs. And the branch beside the house still hasn’t show any signs of flow in spite of the considerable rain we finally got. While areas further south reached the extraordinary point, we never quite made the last jump, but we had been living with forest fires and smoke for weeks, to the point that every National Guard helicopter in Kentucky seemed to be assigned here to fight fires. When a rain finally reached us that extinguished all the fires and kept us from making that jump to extraordinary, we could not have been more grateful.

By now you will have heard about the tragic conflagration in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, so you will know what the rain potentially saved us from.

On the subject of gratitude, this drought taught us to be grateful for living in the shade of the mountain just behind us to the south. Usually, especially in fall and winter, we are bemoaning the fact that the mountain’s bulk blocks all but two or three hours of sunlight, leaving frosts and snow to linger all day to weeks. This fall that sun-shadow worked to our advantage, because it meant that the soil’s existing moisture and the few sprinkles we did get didn’t burn off in the sun within a few hours, the way they did on the opposite slope.

The second notable weather originated in Alaska. We had a lovely summer, as we always do, but not conducive to good fishing. There was a huge dearth of snow last winter, and very hot weather early. Global warming assured we suffered through multiple days of temperatures in the eighties, records falling by the ripples. Unheard of in our area of Alaska. What snow we did have and counted on to feed the rivers across the summer melted and flooded the rivers early in the season. No snow, high water early in the season, and scarce water later, not a combination devoutly to be wished.

The third weather event took place inside. We rolled in from Alaska at the end of summer to a heat wave and a wall air conditioner that wouldn’t come on. Or, to be precise, one that would come on but not cool the air. It took us more than a week to get a technician to come, and meanwhile we stewed in boiling weather. I don’t think the temperature fell below 75 degrees during that period, even at night. At one point, my Houston sister-in-law assured me that our low would get down to 68 the coming night. When I rose next morning to 78 degrees, I immediately called down threats of floods and locusts on Houston and all its denizens, and threatened zika-carrying mosquitoes.

But there was good news. Appalachian Heating and Cooling arrived at 8 that morning. By 9:30, the air conditioner was working. By ten the house was both cool and dry, we could afford to turn the lights on without jacking up the temperature, I was no longer was sporting an envelope of glowing sweat, and all was good.

It took until 9:30 partly because the technician liked to talk but mostly because he couldn't get the air conditioner out of the wall. Apparently it has become one with the house.

The downside of a one-with-the-house air conditioner was that he therefore couldn't get to the capacitor, which he had tentatively (and correctly, it turned out) diagnosed as the problem part. Finally, he concluded he had to cut a hole in the outside metal case of the unit to get to the capacitor, which he did. We can live with a hole, even if birds, yellow jackets, and vampires take up residence in there, but not with 90-plus degrees, 90-plus humidity, and nothing but fans.

The upside of a one-with-the-house air conditioner is that, since I work directly under the air conditioner, I can now feel reassured it will not burst out of the wall and take out me, my printer, my laptop, and possibly my entire desk.

There is a corollary to this story: When we got back, all our salt, in the shakers and the box, had clumped together. It took a lot of pounding and swearing to get a few stuck-together grains broken off the main mass and out through those little shaker holes.

But after about four hours of cold air inside and a river of extracted humidity draining off the outside of the unit, I figured I would be able to fill the shakers so we could have salt-without-swearing on our wonderful Grainger County (Tennessee, and delicious) tomatoes I’d found the day before.

Hah! Short of peeling the salt out of the box as one three-inch-in-diameter lump, it was clear that no shaker-filling was going to occur. So I consoled myself with the thought that, after a day or two, the salt should have dried out enough to flow. Consolation was succeeded by realism. Chances were, when the salt dried, it would still be one lump. A hard, dry lump that would need a pickaxe and a wood chipper to restore to grains. So salt went on my shopping list.

Salt is not all. When we left, I had a bunch of financial papers to shred (post-income-tax cleanup), and they hadn't done a thing to shred themselves while we’d been gone. One night, while I was sitting in the dark sweating, it occurred to me that I could sweat in front of the shredder, so I hied over there, separated a couple of pages, fired up the shredder, and poked them in. Bad plan. They were so saturated with humidity that they stuck to themselves, stuck to the shredder, jammed up the teeth, and caused the shredder to make noises reminiscent of a whining dog trying to harmonize with the shuddering roar our garbage grinder emits when asked to grind up corn husks. So I stopped. And pried the mess out of the shredder teeth. Determinedly and over a long period. I'm thinking Christmas will be the right timing. That's if the papers don't form a single lump like the salt. I'll send an email around Christmas to report on that.

At that stage, I was beginning to think that the Devil was at work, and that staying here in the summer would be easier than coping with coming back. Clearly, that's what the Devil favors.

Several other notable things happened to us this year. For about 15 years, bears have been coming back into Eastern Kentucky. Being from Alaska, we know about bears and garbage, so a few years ago, as the bears spread, we had a sturdy trash bin made out of 4x4s and ¾-inch plywood, maybe three feet by four feet, with a very heavy hasp and lock. We customarily waited anyway until Sunday night to take our garbage down to the foot of the mountain for a Monday-morning pickup, so we figured we were bear safe. Not so lucky. It’s true the bin held and the lock held, but we went down one Monday morning to discover that the bear had ripped out the entire installation and tossed it ten feet across our driveway. Don’t know whether it was trying to break it open or just frustrated, but either way the results were not good. It was all the two of us and a friend could do to drag it back and reinstall it on its posts, and the lid was intact but permanently warped. So now we don’t take our garbage to the bin until Monday morning, and next spring we will be on the alert for hungry black bears fresh out of hibernation.

One of the other notable events last year was a mishap the with clothes dryer. I (Nina) am an avid thrift store shopper, but I also live in fear of bringing in roaches and bedbugs. I have therefore always dumped the books I bring home from the thrift store into a plastic garbage bag, hosed them generously with an insecticide and let them marinate a week or two. That is less than environmentally ideal, so when I heard that raising their temperature to 120 degrees would kill critters and eggs, I decided to put my latest purchases in the dryer on high for twenty minutes in lieu of spraying. When the timer pinged, I headed downstairs to retrieve the books, looking forward to reading one of them immediately and free of insecticide instead of two weeks later and toxic. Didn’t quite work out as I expected. The heat had melted the glue, and when I opened the dryer door, a huge avalanche of individual pages foamed out and covered me, the lid, and the floor. I had put probably twelve books in there, and now had a multi-thousand-page puzzle in waiting. So don’t do that, or at least rubber band each book beforehand. (I decided to toss the disassembled book leaves, by the way.)

The last notable incident had to do with shuckey beans. I (Nina; Dean can take them or leave them) love shuckey beans. (Some of you may call them leather britches as my father did.) Some autumns, if we get down from Alaska to Kentucky while the weather is still warm enough to dry them out, I string a few up for the winter. Usually, though, I just buy dried shuckeys, a gallon at a time. Every time I do that, I am told that my forty-dollar-a-gallon shuckeys equate to a bushel of fresh beans. But when I cook them, they don’t come close to a bushel, which would overflow every pot I own. The scientific method never deserts a person indoctrinated in it, so this fall, in Kentucky in a heat wave, I decided to buy a bushel of green beans, dry them, and see how many gallons of shuckeys I got. To be sure no one could claim I hadn’t dried them enough, I left them in the sun and heat until they were wizened, crinkly and sharp, and clattered against each other. When they were terminally shrunken and dry, I put them in gallon ziplocs, as full as I could get the ziplocs and still zip them. I got not one gallon, but nearly three gallons, packed as tight as I could. So the next time someone states that a gallon of dried shuckeys equals a bushel of fresh beans, I am going to ask them, “Uh, have you actually ever measured?”

Have a great new year.
Dean and Nina

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Summing Up 2015

12/20/2015

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Happy Holidays!

Things were a little out of whack this year. For one thing, the most interesting thing that happened to us was snow. Not, I hasten to say, everyday snow. At the beginning of March, Kentucky was hit by a snowstorm that started on Wednesday night and poured down on the state through most of Thursday. By the time it finished it had dumped 17.1” on Lexington, and about the same on us here on the Virginia border. It totally blew away the old Lexington record of 10.3 inches set in 1902.

A problem for Lexington, of course, but not nearly the problem it was for us. Our dump started with freezing rain, which left a nice thick undercoating of ice beneath the snow. We live well up on the side of a mountain and have a corkscrew driveway that bears a remarkable resemblance to Bright Angel Trail down into the Grand Canyon, except just wide enough for a car instead of a mule. Not quite as long, but every bit as vertical. It’s so steep that Dean’s sister, when she visits, stops down on the level and calls us to come down and ferry her and car up, and his Aunt and Uncle flatly refused to visit.

A friend with a tractor tried to clear it for us, but even a tractor couldn’t grab a foothold on the ice under the snow, and failed ignominiously.

We also discovered to our horror that, while we had plenty of food, we were perilously short on beer and wine. After a few days, the road at the bottom of the hill was plowed but that did no good, alas, because while we might be able to struggle down to the road, we’d have no vehicle to cover the many miles to a package store. We sent out an SOS, and Dean’s brother responded with a couple of pack of beer, but flatly refused to essay the hill. So we grabbed walking sticks and post-holed perilously to the bottom of the hill, only to find that he had brought light beer. I am not a beer drinker, so I don’t understand these nuances, but Dean has standards. He also has manners, so he held his thoughts, paid his brother and thanked him, and we post-holed back up the driveway, a trek of probably a good thirty minutes in the plunge forward/slide back gait we were forced into, not to mention toting a 24-pack of the undrinkable and sucking in gasps of icy air with every upward step.

Later that day, we shared our chagrin with a flat-ground neighbor, not intending anything but a funny story. But the good man drove out and bought us real beer and essayed to bring it up to us. He was able to get about halfway up before his four-wheeler spun out. We spotted him slogging the remaining distance, and went out to meet and relieve him of the beer. Let me tell you, if anybody chooses neighbors for All-American distinction, we nominate Bill. Dean was mighty grateful.

After that, we settled in to wait out the snow. We had power and heat, so it was just time we needed to overcome. In the end, we were marooned just short of two weeks. A widespread bunch of friends quickly became aware of our plight, and we entertained each other by trading poems on Facebook about being snowbound with no potables.

By the time the vehicle could essay the driveway, I had run out of verse, read all my library books, made substantial inroads into my stockpile bought from Amazon and Edward R. Hamilton, Booksellers, and was mighty glad to enter a library again.

That wasn’t the only odd event. The other was that, for the first time in 35 years, we missed the second run of sockeye salmon in the Russian river, and it has left us feeling disoriented. Old habits are hard to break faith with. But this year we had to head down to Kentucky because our twelve-year effort to get justice in the courts for our Kentucky timber theft was allegedly going to culminate in a trial in the fall, and we needed to be in Kentucky for the run-up, so we left Alaska about mid-July, a week or two ahead of the second run’s usual arrival in the Russian River. (Most of you know that the Russian River is on the Kenai Peninsula southwest of Anchorage, near our house in the Chugach National Forest, but for those who don’t, it’s a great salmon river in a beautiful place.)

As it turns out, the trial was delayed for the oddest of reasons. Our Judge was under investigation for misfeasance and on hiatus from the bench. How long the delay will be we don’t know, because we don’t have a new date.

Because we knew we would miss the second run, we had to bear down during the first run (June) to get our winter’s supply of salmon. I think we landed enough to last the winter, but it may be nip and tuck. (Isn’t ” nip and tuck” great? Someday, I need to look up those old expressions.)

I got to thinking about working to catch fish, and about subsistence, which is part of most Alaskan’s lives in some way. Not that different from Appalachia in the old days, when nearly everything people ate or used was raised or made. It reminds me of the old mountain philosophy: Use it up; wear it out; make it do, or do without. Appalachians did a lot of “make do” in those days, and we all had our share of “do without.” Dean and I no longer have to depend on subsistence, having more money now than then, but it’s a tradition I hope is never entirely lost.

Of course, subsistence foods in Alaska lean heavily toward salmon, moose, caribou, and wild fowl while subsistence foods in Appalachia tilted heavily toward garden produce, but the principle was not much different. Dean and I still eat subsistence to a large extent. We catch salmon, friends and relatives give us venison, a friend recently gave a generous gift of Colorado elk that, with occasional chicken, provide pretty much all the meat we use. We appreciate that, because we don’t like ingesting all the antibiotics and hormones that go into commercial food.

Although we don’t raise a garden, we have Kentucky friends who are generous with their greens of all varieties, and I buy green beans to dry into shuckeys, when I can find green beans in a store with full beans in the pods. If I can’t find the right beans, I buy home-grown, already-dried shuckey beans (which my father always called leather britches) from Lee and Opal Sexton. Lee (known around here as Lee-Boy, as most Lees are) is nearing ninety, and single-handedly raises an acre of garden. Opal “puts up” the result of Lee’s effort, and they grow enough to sell to others as well, thank goodness.

Lee is a well-known folk/bluegrass banjo player who still tours regularly, but I think he puts a higher value on growing food than on all his musical fame. Early this year, he told us he had been invited to play at the Annual Family Life Festival in Hindman, Kentucky. When he went, he went with not only his banjo but also a truck full of produce. He’d agreed that he’d appear if he was allowed to go first, and after performing he sold produce. He told us proudly that he sold to people from California to Minnesota, and could have sold another truckload if he’d had one. He clearly was prouder of that than of any musical achievement.

That reminded me of the answer Loretta Lynn gave on a talk show one autumn at the apex of her career, when asked what she’d been doing. She said she had been in the kitchen canning most of the summer, and had put up hundreds of quarts. When the host expressed surprise, she said something along the lines of, “Anybody’s career could end tomorrow, but if you raise a garden and have a full cellar, you won‘t starve.” People like Lee and Opal and Loretta, with their feet firmly on the ground, are remnants of the old Appalachia, and it will be a sad day when the last of them is gone.

One more Lee vignette: A couple of years ago we ran into Lee at the local post office. He told us he was looking for a good settin’ hen, and asked if we knew where he could get one. We regretfully told him we couldn’t help, but he found one or more somewhere and we now occasionally buy eggs from Lee when we’re in Kentucky.

I’ve been trying my hand at painting (acrylics) this fall. I do that sporadically, and in the last month I’ve done two paintings. I save photographs that I think I’d like to paint from, and I have hundreds now, most of which I will never tackle. I take these periodic spells, and I try to advance my knowledge a little each time. I hope to get one more done before Christmas.

Dean has been spending a lot of time on video. We’ve started a video-documentary on caning chairs, and have the first part (finding the tree, felling it, and harvesting the bark) done. We hope to get to the next step soon. Meanwhile, he’s documented the performance of a local band for Facebook, Youtube, and cable, and it’s getting a lot of attention.

We are both well. The standard Appalachian answer to “How are you?” is “Middlin’,” but I can fairly say we are better than middlin’. We’ve had an amazingly mild fall (it’s in the sixties today) and are hoping it will last through the winter. We’re also hoping for good water levels in the Alaska rivers in 2016, and good salmon runs.

And we hope for a similar good new year for you, whatever your own definition might be.

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Snowbound

3/12/2015

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This year, Kentucky managed to snow us in more than Alaska ever did in all our years there. On the sixteenth of last month, we got somewhere between twelve and fourteen inches, depending on where around the house we measured. I'm sure New England would have scoffed at our dismay.

Even for us, it was not a lot, compared to some snows we've been in. We got twenty-four inches on President's Day once in DC, and in spite of living in a pseudo-Southern city with limited snow equipment, were able to get out back to work on Thursday. But there we lived in a suburb of a large metropolitan area, with a short driveway debouching onto a public, eventually-plowed street.

Here, our house is perched on the steep side of a mountain above a tiny hamlet in the Cumberland Mountains of Eastern Kentucky, which we learned is a whole different animal. Our driveway is four-wheel-drive steep and sports two hairpin turns that almost require backing up to negotiate, besides being flanked by near-vertical drop-offs. It is also dauntingly long, so maintaining uphill momentum even with four-wheel-drive would be a trick even if we didn't have the hairpin curves. We clearly needed plowing.

We don't have a snowplow, and apparently we have that in common with most of the rest of this county. We called around, found one person with the equipment to do private plowing, and found he was both booked and unenthusiastic about our location.

So, no plowing. Then the weather warmed just enough to bless us with ice and freezing rain. Instead of melting the snow, the drops just arrowed down through it, compacting into several inches of slush sitting on top of up to an inch of ice, all sitting under a foot of snow. Stepping into the snow almost guaranteed landing on some body part one just wouldn't want to break. Especially marooned as we were.

Then we discovered Dean had no beer. Plenty of food, yes. And water, so long as the power lasted. And heat ditto. A friend tried to get up to us in a four-wheeler to relieve the beer crisis, but the four-wheeler wasn't up to the job. Another friend brought a plough/backhoe combination, but couldn't break the ice with the backhoe blade nor get traction with his small tractor and plow.

We always knew that, in a pinch, we could leave the car at home and posthole down the mountain (or maybe luge on a flattened cardboard box) and eventually reach a plowed road, but we weren't feeling that desperate, especially considering that we'd have to posthole back up a steep slope covered with a snow/slush/ice base that guaranteed the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-slide-back. And carrying whatever we had slogged out to get. It seemed to almost assure a broken leg. So we settled in to wait it out.

It took fourteen days.

But we kept power, so we never had to use our candles-in-a-coffee-jar back-up heat plan, nor the presumably better ad hoc camp stove made of a toilet paper roll jammed in an empty vegetable can filled with alcohol. For heat, mind you, not for cooking.

There was some concern here and there about our mental health. A friend emailed asking if we were getting along or beginning to strategize where to bury body parts, and we were able to reply that fortunately we were getting along.

Our trials were made lighter by another friend, who emailed us a poem about our plight:

Dean's Wish

SOS! I NEED SOME HELP! I'M SNOWED IN HERE IN BLACKEY!

THE FOOD IS LOW; MY BEER IS OUT; I THINK I'M GOING WACKEY!

GO GET A HELICOPTER OR A DRONE; I NEED SOME HELP RIGHT NOW!

OH WHAT I'D GIVE TO SEE A FRIEND COME BY WITH A PLOW.!

To which we responded:

SNOWBOUND

A friend has learned, and seems concerned, about our perilous snowbound condition.

But all we can say is we'll find a way to get through in the mountain tradition.

There's a polar breeze, snow's over our knees, what's not snow-covered is icy.

There's a socked in sky; even drones can't fly. The situation is decidedly dicey.

Our provisions are low; there's talk of more snow, and it looks like it probably will.

But a neighbor near here has pledged some beer, if we can slog to the foot of our hill.

That led to a call-and-response exchange of verses, but she is so much better than us that we finally conceded with:

It came like a missile, your latest epistle. We studied what it said.

So this is it; we're going to quit. No way can we get ahead.

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Summing up 2014

12/21/2014

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We usually sum up our year in our Christmas letter to our family and friends. Here is 2014:

First, we apologize for the lateness of this letter and cast the blame on Nina’s computer, which we were deprived of for most of December until yesterday. It went through so complete an overhaul in its visit to the cyberdoctor that everything on it that hadn’t married it at the factory underwent a forced divorce and was gone when we got it home, of which the software we reloaded to write this letter was but a minor part. And it is looking like the important part – the stayed-behind-in-the-shop part - is unlikely to come back, alas. So don’t trust inanimate objects like computers. They are clearly out to get humans. Think HAL.

Aside from computer struggles, we realized when we started to write this letter that we have become very dull people, because we couldn’t think of a relatable thing that happened to us in 2014 except for the naked computer and the fact that we developed a roof leak in Alaska. Those have ramifications, yes, but none that would interest anyone else.

Our friends are doing interesting things – opening an antique store, for instance, or mulling a run for governor, or going to Dubai for the weekend (no, she’s not rich, she’s just clever), or moving a huge sailboat to Florida – which by contrast render us even more staid.

We did have some Berea College students down here this fall to talk about the environment and Appalachia. During the evening session, we wandered into local ghost stories, including one that happened to Dean’s brother Lee, and one that happened to his Aunt Mary. In Lee’s case, he saw a headless man on the highway between here and Ulvah. Ulvah sits on one of the possible routes back to Berea from here.

The students were much more interested in the ghost stories than the serious stuff, and, as we said our goodbyes in the dark of the parking lot, demanded to be taken back via Ulvah in hopes of seeing Lee’s ghost. Their faculty driver nixed (don’t you love those old crime noir expressions?) that proposal, admonishing them, “How likely is that? Waiting to see a ghost is not like waiting to see a moose come by.”

We refrained from telling him that, even in Alaska, waiting to see a moose come by is not a high percentage gamble either, unless you’re standing at the moose exhibit at the zoo. We do see them quite a lot, but always by chance. Taking a stand in a particular place and expecting one to show is like expecting a live deer to appear inside Bergdorf-Goodmans in NYC. Not impossible, but definitely don’t hold your breath.

(We will give you Aunt Mary’s ghost story later sometime.)

We are all agog at the thought of having a friend as governor. We did brush elbows with some prominent people when we lived in DC, but none were personal friends whom we could ask, “What’s it like to be a governor, governor?”

We have been trying to expand a fifteen-minute video of a local stir-off (an event, for you A-List people, at which sorghum molasses are made) to a thirty-minute documentary and, let us tell you, it would be easier to take pieces of the moon and construct a planet the size of Jupiter. There just isn’t enough to work with.

So we have been trying to expand it by including what Dean calls “animal boring facts,” along the lines of “Did you know that, in parts of the Middle East, molasses are made from grapes?”

(That phrase “animal-boring facts” is borrowed, by the way. When we lived in DC, one of the radio stations featured a thoroughly entertaining drive-time duo. One of them loved odd bits of knowledge, as I do, but whenever he tried to share one, his partner would cut him off with “No animal-boring facts!” Dean shares his dislike of A-BFs, so you can imagine the angst when I try to insert them to fill in the holes in the video.)

We will no doubt post the video here on Cornett Media when it's finished in a few weeks, so check back if you'd like to learn about Sugar Cane, Sorghum, and Stir-offs.

This summer, on the Russian River in Alaska, we did not experience, but did miss, one of the video opportunities of a lifetime. We had been filming a sow bear and two cubs (Warning, A-BF coming: In the bear world females are called sows and males boars, but the young are not called piglets or shoats; they are cubs; don’t know why in either case) fishing along the other bank of the river.

Dean had just shut off the camera and we’d turned to leave when this big boar came roaring out of the riverside brush toward the sow and cubs. Sows with cubs keep away from boars with the same fervor doctors isolate ebola patients, and for the same survival purposes, since boars often kill and sometimes eat cubs. We can only speculate that the sow was upwind to have let a boar get so close without scenting it and reacting.

She reacted like lightning, though, once she saw it. She and the cubs flew out of the river at an angle away from the charge, leapt onto the bank, and were into the woods in a flash, the rear cub escaping the swipe of the boar’s paw by a hair. We didn’t have time to turn the camera on, much less point and shoot. One of those frustrations life is full of, alas.

Another frustration: We have been hoping to spot a black bear around our house in Kentucky, attracted by food in the woods. (Not that we would put food out to attract a bear; we would never do that. After all, it is illegal. And it didn’t work anyway.) So far, all we seem to attract is possums. Do we seem to be on a frustration roll here?

Have a wonderful, unfrustrating holiday season!

Dean and Nina

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More on Mixed Pickles

10/14/2014

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Last week I wrote about Appalachian mixed pickles (corn, green beans, and cabbage "sauerkrauted," so to speak). I got some comments on the blog site and some from outside it.

One of the non-blog comments was from a local lady here, Joanne, who gave me a quick tip for producing mixed pickles myself. She assured me that if I will buy and drain a can of corn and a can of beans, mix them with a can of undrained sauerkraut, and give the mixture time to marinate a little, I will have "shortcut" mixed pickles (my term).

I am glad to have the tip, although the process lacks several things compared to real mixed pickles.

One of the assets it lacks is a real bean inside the bean pod. In our gardens around here, we let our bean pods bulge with actual beans before we pick them, and that means mixed pickles full of wonderful, protein-laden beans and not just flat green hulls.

I have never bought a bean at a store, whether canned or fresh, that had any "bean" in the bean pod, and something critical is lost in the translation.

I am grateful for Joanne's tip, and I don't say I won't try Joanne's method if a " jones" for mixed pickles overcomes me when the quarts I have are a memory, but until that time, I will stick with Opal Sexton's mixed pickles, gloating about all the lovely round beans pushed up against the glass of the jar before I consign them to the skillet.

There are other reasons. Besides missing what green beans bulging with real beans contribute to the taste and the look-and-gloat factor, the other lack in the store-bought method is the step of stringing the beans.

I grew up stringing beans before we cooked or canned them. In those days bean pods came with tough strings along the seams. You grabbed hold of the end of the bean with the little hook, and pulled away from the curve of the hook. Generally, that little end broken off, and you could pull the string off that entire side.

When you hit the end, you pinched off that end, and continued pulling the string back along the other side of the bean. (I know I'm introducing a confusion factor here by using "stringing beans" for two different processes. This is a precursor to stringing the beans with twine to dry and make shuckeys; with shuckeys you are stringing up strung beans.)

Appalachian women strung beans by the bushel. Multiple family members would sit on the porch, pile their lap, usually apron-covered, full of unstrung beans, and commence to string, dropping the strung bean into a container for further processing, and the strings back into the apron. At the end of several hours of replenishing the apron and removing the strings from the pod,delving among the pile of strings to find the whole beans, the apron would be heaped with strings, the supply basket would be empty, and the pods would be ready to string with twine for drying or break for cooking or canning.

These day, if you buy fresh green beans at a grocery store, chances are they will be stringless. I learned this only recently, although I suspect it has been the case for ages.

No doubt that is more convenient for factory processing, but it has taken away bean-stringings and the pleasure of working and visiting with others on a common task, not to mention the small hit of satisfaction that came with removing the strings from a single bean pod, accumulated into a large feeling of satisfaction as the last bean is finished. There are few pleasures greater than working together for a common goal.

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Apples, Shuckeys, and Mixed Pickles

10/2/2014

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I've been doing some farmish things I never did growing up in a coal camp (or anyway never did beyond helping mother). I've been drying green beans to make shuckey beans, or, as my father called them, leather britches. If you have eaten shuckeys, you won't need any explanation, and if you haven't I can't really describe the difference in taste from fresh green beans (slightly smoky, maybe?), but I like them very much.

I've learned since starting to winter in Kentucky that shuckey-bean drying has changed over the years. Mother and I used to punch a needle threaded with strong twine through the center flat side of the whole green bean pod and continue that until we had multiple long strings of them. We'd hang the strings outside in the sun or inside over doors to dry. These days I find my neighbors - those who produce shuckeys - break them ready for cooking and spread the broken pieces under the back window of their closed-up, hot car to dry, or spread them on a piece of tin or aluminum out in the sun, or even put them in an electric dehydrator. Ah, technology. I'm using the car method, although we have an SUV and so no shelf under the back window. As a backup, we have them spread on the console under the windshield. Since the beans and the newspaper they sit on reflect so dreadfully it makes it hard to drive, that means a lot of taking-out-the-beans and putting-the-beans-back-in before and after each use of the vehicle, which the under-the-back-window-folk don't have to cope with. I'II have to admit it's more convenient to use the beans if they have been broken before drying, and they might dry faster as well, but I still love the process of stringing and the look of the strung beans, not to mention avoiding the repetitive in-and-out, the so I may go back to tradition next year.

I've also been consumed with picking, eating, processing, and giving away apples. We have two large apple trees - winesaps - on our land. They don't usually yield enough to worry about but this year we had a bumper crop. I eat several a day, but the tree yields a lot more than that. Many of them inevitably fall to the ground and often are damaged. If they are only moderately bruised, I pick them up, wash them, and save them for eating. Refrigerated undamaged, they will keep for months, and I cram as many of the undamaged ones as I can in the interstices between other food, to the point that, if the refrigerator had a more forgiving coefficient of elasticity, it would bulge. Unfortunately, it would take a refrigerator a lot bigger than normal to hold all the tree has produced this fall, or all I can eat in a year. Or, this year, it seems, all even the deer can eat.

I'm also pursuing mixed pickles which, belying the common non-Appalachian assumption, have no cucumbers in them. They are a mix of green beans, corn, and cabbage, processed like sauerkraut. I find that I'm surprising myself with this foodie activity, since I have never been domestic. In the interests of truth, I confess that I am buying the mixed pickles from a lovely lady here in town named Sexton who put up 32 quarts of mixed pickles this year, and is willing to sell me five of those quarts. (For those who don't know, one drains a jar of mixed pickles, and pitches them into a skillet of hot oil to heat. That skillet once held a generous amount of bacon grease, but these days, in the interests of our arteries, it holds a little olive oil.) If the mixed pickles have had years to marinate and are very sour, many people soak them in cold water for a while to moderate the sour and take out some of the salt, after which one can proceed to the drain and pitch step.

We of course brought back a lot of frozen salmon from Alaska, and we are the beneficiaries of a doe's weight of venison, (plus we occasionally receive gifts of personally raised and killed pork) so we will be eating little from the grocery store this year and much from the freezer. There's so much I don't know if the two of us can eat it in a year, but it feels good to kind of live off the land.

I'm off to wash the apples we picked from the tree or picked up from the ground this morning.

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Preserving Appalachia, American Chestnut, and other thoughts

1/11/2014

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Dean and I got an email today expressing appreciation for our documentary on the demise of the American Chestnut. The writer, Gail, was from New York, was scheduled to give a speech to a gardening club, and apparently had run onto the video on youtube as she was researching for the talk. She had taken the trouble to find an email address for us and send us an email telling us she liked the video. We are thrilled every time we get a communication like that, especially one that takes some trouble to do. It's wonderful to know that viewers appreciate the chestnut video. We reaped such pleasure and had such a great learning experience as we made it that we are always glad to know that others had the same pleasure in viewing it.

In her email, Gail mentioned the poignancy of the oral histories. That set me to thinking about how lucky we were to get those. Lucky to locate some of those from past Appalachians, and luckier still to have some neighbors in this county who had personal memories. We particularly loved Grace Caudill's memories. Grace passed away a few months ago, and would have taken that knowledge with her had we not had the luck to capture it. Pauline Cantrell was a hundred years old when we filmed her, so her memories were on the verge of being lost as well. Besides the chestnuts, she told us wonderful stories about her family's moving up into eastern Kentucky from Tennessee when she was a young girl. They came by wagon over the most minimal of roads. It took more than a week, driving during the day and camping at night, to cover what would be much less than a day's journey now, even on the very narrow, curvy roads we still have in these mountains. Although she didn't say so, I suspect they were drawn to make that long, difficult journey by the prospect of work in the coal mines for one of the coal companies, which were just beginning to build towns and establish mines on a large scale.

My guess is that, on that journey from Tennessee, there were no bridges, and the wagon had to frequently ford creeks. Sometime, I suspect, the creek was the road. I can guess that with some comfort, because here in this county today, I have drivens roads that were creek beds. The road up Kingdom Come starts as a paved road which becomes a gravel road, and then becomes a creek bed. With water. The water wasn't deep when we drove it in a car - maybe six inches - but it wasn't dry either, and there are times when it's a lot deeper. To get to the homestead where my uncle Gene grew up, you have to take the creek a ways, as we would say in Appalachia. To an urbanite, that might seem incredible, but to me, it's a piece of Appalachia I am glad to see still exists.

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Restoring Appalachian Roots

12/21/2013

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I am from Appalachia. I was away from it for long decades, but I am immersed in it again. And what I have come to realize is how much I appreciate the mountain language I no longer speak, but happily still can understand.

After college, I went to graduate school in the Midwest, and then lived in Alaska, California, Colorado and other TV-commentator-accent locales. I moved to those places after college, but that was not when I lost my language. That actually took place while I was in college, a college that sat in Kentucky but not truly in Appalachia. When I was in college, I decided (with some pretty good evidence) that most of the world equated a southern or Appalachian accent with stupidity. Since I was not stupid (on any test you might want to name, I would have outscored a lot of those who took the “stupid” position), and since my ego didn’t care for being thought stupid, I made a determined effort to move my birthplace linguistically, so as not to be assigned to the stupid class based only on accent. By the time I had finished that effort (about six months), I had gone so far overboard that I apparently moved linguistically to England; I sounded faintly upper-class British, with wonderful enunciation and preciseness, and was sometimes mistaken for a Brit.

Sometime after that, as I scoped other parts of the country, I began to overcome my ego, and my speech mellowed into standard American with just traces of something that people would comment on favorably and ask about. Appalachia never did come back, but people would vaguely peg me as a Virginian (my birthplace) or perhaps from somewhere in the south.

About ten years ago, I resumed living in Appalachia for a good fraction of each year, among Appalachians who never left and who somehow escaped pollution by TV-speak, and became bathed in my mother tongue again. I find it wonderful. Some of its character depends on pronunciation, and some of it on its wonderful expressions, but the sum total forms a pattern you hear nowhere else. Yesterday, we were talking to a local official, and he added an “h” to the word “it.” To be clear, he said something along the lines of, “Hit’s a good thing…” That’s not a pronunciation that you hear everywhere. Of course, I heard it growing up, but not in all the years I was away. Now I hear it again, and I like it instead of deploring it. Let me say up front: the official is not stupid. He has, I am sure, a college degree. His children have advanced degrees. He is successful and they are successful. But he is Appalachian, and he pronounces the word “it” as “hit.” And good for him. I have done a 180 from the days when I tried to lose my home accent, and now I hope it survives forever, if not in me, at least in others in Appalachia.

The prototypical Appalachian pronunciation marker, of course, is in the way we say “I,” the perpendicular pronoun. Our rendering of the vowel “I” is generally characterized as a flat “I.” This is in contract to the standard pronunciation, which is often summed up as a round “I.” I take issue with the description “flat”, and I will talk about that in a minute. But I do have to say that I think characterizing the standard pronunciation of “I” as round has some credibility. The sound does curve. It has a tail, in fact, that almost makes it sound like two syllables. You can’t say it quickly. You are forced to draw out the sound.

In contrast, the Appalachian “I” can be said in a fraction of a second. “Flat” somehow doesn’t convey that short sound. Borrowing a term from music, I would characterize it as the very opposite: sharp rather than flat. It just has that cutoff sound that “sharp” conveys.

Names that have the same spelling don’t sound the same in Appalachia either. My Aunt Mary has, to her husband Gene, been “Murry” all her life. And that is also good. It’s the way Appalachians say the name, and it’s a difference worth keeping. Most of us have lost that, but Uncle Gene is in his tenth decade, and he is grounded in the old.

Setting aside punctuation issues, I could go on for a long time about Appalachian expressions, but I will confine myself to just one example here. About ten years ago, visiting my former town in Appalachia, I fell into conversation with a neighbor slightly younger than me, but much more genuinely Appalachian in his speech. He was talking about his family’s graveyard. (One of the characteristics of Appalachia is that nearly every family has its own graveyard, which the family maintains. The big commercial burying grounds are uncmmon here, especially if you get out of the towns and into the hollows.) He was talking about the hours he put in on his ancestors’ plots, and he said, about his siblings, “Now, I’m not throwing off on them, but…” What he was saying to me was that, while he was not criticizing them, it was an unfortunate fact that they were not putting in their share of work needed to maintain the graveyard. Internally, I greeted that expression with joy. It had passed from my mind years before, and meeting it again was like meeting an old friend. Then I got to thinking of “Shoot fire (the latter word pronounced “far”), and of “chimlee” instead of chimney, and was off on a recision to my my language youth. Other expressions came to mind, to my pleasure, but I will leave “Shoot fire”, “chimlee” and others to another day.

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Summing Up 2018

Summing Up 2017

Summing Up 2016

Summing Up 2015

Snowbound

Summing up 2014

More on Mixed Pickles

Apples, Shuckeys, and Mixed Pickles

Preserving Appalachia, American Chestnut, and other thoughts

Restoring Appalachian Roots

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