Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I've always loved that Kate Bush song. Even after her voice began to grate upon me...as it unfortunately did after a while...that song about the dream of letting another feel the empathy that the narrator so keenly feels still plays in my head. I thought, for a long time, that everyone felt empathy. By that, I mean the ability to actually imagine others suffering, pain and hope. Empathy is no good unless you can feel the positives as well. But I was wrong about that. Not everyone feels that.

And if you do feel it, it is kinder and more polite not to let on that you do sometimes. It can be intrusive and that whole "I feel your pain" thing just trivializes it.

I look back and laugh at how much I was so amazingly wrong about in the past. I like the feeling of being wrong. It's funny and it makes me feel giddy and light.

Deals with God are a recurrent theme in the oral traditions here. In the outside world, those who believe in a god or gods make deals all the time. Many times, those with no strong belief make deals with God. It's sort of become a figure of speech. I'm sure I've done it before.

Here it is different. It's deadly serious. You don't make a deal with God unless you mean to keep it. The God of the mountains is the old testament God, He who canst "draw out the leviathan" and all that. He's real big on smiting and throwing His weight around.

To me, the god of the mountains is as foreign as Gilgamesh's Anu. But I can see why He's taken so very seriously. He's quite the Badass.

Scottie related a tale to me of his great-great grandfather.

As a young man, Cletis was a moonshiner of some repute. I'm not quite sure how much the sampling of his own wares had to do with this story, but that doesn't make it less life changing for Cletis.

One evening, he was making his way home from his still that was up in the woods not too far from my house. Night had begun to fall and he was feeling his way home in the darkness of the new moon. Even today, since we have no city lights to pollute the night sky, the Milky Way is clearly visible in the night sky, stretching its jeweled arms around the earth. The nights of the full moon are as bright as a lit city street. The nights of the new moon are a womb-like blackness.

While passing a hand-dug spring well, a claw reached out and grabbed Cletis by the leg, dragging him into the deep, cold, wet darkness. A violent struggle ensued, during which, Cletis came to the realization that he was grappling with the Devil.

Time and time again, Cletis was pulled under the surface of the freezing water and rose gasping for breath, only to be pulled under once more.

So, he made a deal with God. In his deal, he promised God quite a lot. And given the circumstances, I think that was understandable. Basically, he handed God a blank check in return for helping him survive this situation.

Cletis survived to beget many generations to follow him. He forswore drinking and the making of white whiskey. He brought all of his children up in obedience to what he believed God wanted. His ideals are still practiced by his ancestors today.

I'm not sure if he was right or wrong. It's not my place to judge his epiphany. I do know that his deal was made in fear, and that sits uneasily with me. The brand of Christianity he practiced feels cold and unforgiving to me.

I much prefer the deal another man made with God.

While his beloved wife lay dying in the hospital, he swore to never drink again, if only God would save his love. She survived and he hasn't touched a drop of alcohol in thirteen years. They are the happiest couple I know.

I like the idea of making a deal with God out of love rather than fear.

I don't hear much about women having epiphanies of this sort. Usually it involves men, moonshine and running around on one's wife. It's just another version of the "reformed rake".

I suppose I'm not surprised that empathy is so suppressed here. You have to be quiet and still to experience empathy. That's sort of hard to do with Cletis' brand of faith, which is loud, brassy and talkative. It's the problem I have with the whole "witnessing" thing. It doesn't let anyone get a word in edgewise and is all about "me".

They sure do sing good though.

The man is quiet about his epiphany. I only heard about it in passing, he doesn't talk much about it, he just acts. There is no need to talk about it. His love shows through with each glance at his wife. His love is his prayer.

I don't know if God cares about the motivations we have when we try to barter with Her/Him. But my God visits me in the form of tiny goat hooves, joking dogs, laughing streams and baby chicks. This requires stillness.

My hope is that if I ever need to seriously barter with God, that the preferred method of payment will be love.

I'll have a story up soon. But as I mentioned...it's a really dark one and I don't want to put it up during the holidays. Or at least until after Christmas.

So...I'm just going to pratter about aimlessly.

I still have no goat babies. We are getting very close now, though. Last night she started the restless pawing and laying down. Then getting up and doing it all over again. It's sort of annoying. I'm working on my computer and it's like trying to fall asleep next to someone who keeps tossing and turning.

I've had many conversations with Betsy, my Goat Yoda, over the past week. She agrees that it does indeed sound like delivery is imminent. I discussed with her the problem of Blinkin's skittishness. The Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod trio came from a place where they were shot at with a shotgun full of ratshot every time they got out. They are, understandably, distrustful of people. I'm concerned since I may have to milk Blinkin' if one of these babies comes out needing to be bottle raised.

Betsy says I should smear myself with the birth fluids and allow Blinkin' to lick them off of me, thus associating me with the kids. I'm not sure at what point in this procedure I'm supposed to recite the lesbian tone poem to interpretive dance movements....but I'm sure it's gotta be there somewhere.

Now for an awkward segue into what I fixed for dinner today....

My friend Scott came over today for Christmas lunch. Overjoyed with the prospect of getting to cook for someone other than myself and dog children (who, quite frankly, do not have the most discriminating palates), I went rather overboard. Though it isn't Friday, I thought I'd share my holiday menu.

What I loved most about this meal is the fact that I grew and harvested all of the vegetables including the pumpkin used for the pie right here on the farm. I made and canned the ginger pear chips and the dill-pickled green tomatoes. The meal was a huge success and even Scott's 6 foot 9 inch frame was stuffed to capacity.

I really miss feeding people.

Hope everyone had a great day and ate entirely too much. I know I did.

Gotta go....Blinkin' is having contractions!!!

I got nothin'.

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy Holidays and a Merry Christmas if you are of that persuasion. I have strong feelings about inclusivity during this time of year. Too many people feel alone and sad during these cold nights. I just want to give everyone of every faith a great big hug.

Pardon my syncretization.

If you want to read some previous Christmas themed posts...

The Night the Animals Talked.....

For some reason, I always end up spending Christmas Eve with one of the Winkin', Blinkin' or Nod trio on the porch. This year it's Blinkin'. Last year it was Nod. Year before that, I think I actually spent the night nursing Winkin' through entero up in the shelter.

The Grinch Who Stole Christmahanukwanzakah

I can't tell you how very disappointed I am that this post from last year is still relevant.

Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum. ~Cicero

I find the mob and public opinion parts of this quote particularly relevant...and wish the absurd politics could be left out.

We need to bring our troops home from the "culture wars" as well.

So there is your sweet and sour. Take one. Take both. Find balance.

And no...ain't got no stinkin' babies yet. I'm afraid to let her off the porch because she'll probably go down the mountain and have them, and I'll be damned if I'm going to cross Big Creek in the dead of winter to scale up and carry kids back down the mountain.

Well, this was taken at midnight. She's made herself a nice little nest out of the bale of straw I put out there. I originally just put enough down for bedding but she decided to use the entire bale.

I've got someplace to go Saturday so may not be able to blog much tomorrow. Off to bed now. I guess she'll wake me up if she starts to drop.

Killing time still while waiting for the kids to arrive. Damn. I think she means to wait til Christmas. It's a real pain in the ass since her "lying in" is happening on the back porch where I can see her from my computer. The herd doesn't want to leave her alone. I originally thought this was because of some tender goatly concern. Now I think they just want her snacks. It's keeping Max, the cocker spaniel stock dog, very busy.

With being tied to the house and all, I've been sifting through blogs I might like to know better. I ran into Rum and Monkey which has the greatest personality generators. I normally hate those things, but these were very witty. I took the "Which Famous Homosexual Are You?" test.

And, of course...

Which Famous Homosexual Are You?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

Maybe I should have answered the "Have you decimated a village?" question differently.

Other amusing tests include "The Historical Lunatic Test" (I'm Niklas Tesla...Huh?) and the "The Goddamn Rock Solid Ghetto Shiznit Name Generator" (I'm "Ass Machine G"..they seem to know things about me that I don't reveal very often...scary).

Some of my favorite past blogs have had a feature on one day of the week. South Knox Bubba, who I miss desperately in his original form, used to have Friday Bird Blogging with his wonderful bird photos. I really want to do that.

So, I'm wracking my brain over what in the world I'm talented enough at to do such a feature as I'm pouring more "glugs" of bourbon into the sweet potatoes...and wondering how many "glugs" of bourbon the sweet potatoes can withstand without losing their "loft" in the oven...when it came to me.

Without further ado...I give you....

Since a few of you asked about Blinkin' ...she's fine. No kids as of yet.

I got her up on the milkstand late last night and palpated her abdomen. It was really cool to feel the kids kick back. There are at least two of them in there. Wouldn't it be cool if she had triplets? Around two a.m. she decided she'd had enough of being separated from the herd and slipped her collar so she could go sleep with her grown daughter, Nod.

I've got her on the back porch now with a nest of clean straw. I'm not really worried about her since she doesn't seem to be very worried for herself. I think her milk has a ways to draw down yet. Her udder should get even more full before she freshens. She is starting to make funny goat noises and is nipping at her flanks. I think I could still have 24 to 48 hours until kidding. I'm not sure since I've never seen Blinkin' kid before and I don't know what her usual routine is.

I'm going to try to get pictures of the actual kidding if I can. I may be too busy, but hopefully she'll not need any help.

Needless to say, it's hard for me to concentrate on my writing while I'm in my role of goatherd.

I went to town to get supplies today. My buddy, Scott, went along with me. It was sort of nice having someone make the rounds with me to the Co-op and the Farm Supply. We ate lunch at the dreadful Chinese place. Scott really likes it. There used to be a really good authentic place, but the Chinese buffet is more popular with the locals. They do serve frog legs and I do like a nice frog leg now and again. And it's way better than what they call Chinese food in the UK. I'm not sure what curry on chips has to do with Chinese food. I never got that.

I'm wondering what to name the new babies. Do you think I'd go to hell if I named one "Jesus"?

I wonder how that would look on the ADGA registration if I bother with it. "Old Maid's Aerie's Jesus Marimba". I sort of like the sound of that.

Yeah. It's definitely getting warm in here.

So...I'm getting in the jeep to make my once monthly big market trip when I look down in the pasture and see that Blinkin' s udder has filled out. Oh, joy. Looks like I'm getting goat kids for Christmas.

Blinkin is one of my farm goats that has some meat goat bred into her. But she's been bred to one of my lovely Nubian boys so the kids she has will qualify as grades and in a few generations their kids will qualify as American Nubians.

Her udder isn't great since she's got one forked teat, but she's really hardy and I'd like to pass that trait on to my herd. Blinkin' can almost thrive on air. I've got her tethered and bedded under the back porch so I can keep an eye on her. She's in early labor right this moment. I know she's going to be happy to get those babies out of there. You can't tell from the photo but she's really huge. I'm thinking twins at least.

I've got all my kidding supplies out and am sleeping on the sofa tonight in case she starts to drop in the middle of the night. The Saanans aren't due for another few weeks but it looks like the boys took care of Blinkin' earlier than expected.

Cross your fingers for us that they are doe kids. I gots too many boys right now anyway.

I'm in for a long night, looks like.

I just don't know what to say.

Please just go to this link to find out way too much information about penis sizes from across the globe.

Rising up in protest over the long and short of penis size

Very flattering to the French...but we so knew that already.

I've got some stuff to do tonight so I'm not going to bore you with much here. Just picking up some odds and ends before I forget.

There were some research items about Lizie and Martha that I didn't use in Cat Fur Jelly.

Martha and Lizie were what we call down in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, "root women." They knew all of the traditional remedies that could be made from the wild-gathered materials on hand here.

Medical care up here was spotty at best. A friend is fond of telling "birthing" stories...the gorier the better. She's told me a gang of them and they always seemed to include a doctor, so I thought maybe the situation wasn't as bad as I'd been lead to believe. Until she let it slip that many of the "doctors" were actually veterinarians and who is to say they weren't just untrained horse doctors. There was a tinker who used to come through here and pull teeth.

So, Lizie and Martha's skills would have been much in demand.

One of their recipes involved making a tea from oak, alder and wild cherry bark. This was supposed to be used as a mouthwash to draw infection from teeth and gums. Henberry was used as a soporific and for kidney ailments. "Kidney ailments" appears to be a euphemism for cystitis or any sort of burning pain in the nether areas. The roots of Queen of the Meadow were also dug for "kidney ailments". Ground up mountain laurel leaves were mixed with laying mash to worm chickens. Kerosene was given for lots of things. The ginseng that grows up here was used much as it is in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)...as a stimulant, tonic and for boy stuff. Tetch me Not was used for snakebite(probably not a very efficacious use) and for skin problems including poison ivy(actually this works).

I continue to collect remedies that were used here.

A few notes left over from I'll Fly Away.

There were two schools that I know of thus far that were near here. There was the Bell Hill School, a one room schoolhouse teaching grades 1 - 8, that stood where the current Hall Family Reunion is held each year on Hall's Top. The other was a two room schoolhouse called The Raven's Branch School. This would have been up Raven's Branch way somewhere. It taught grades 1 - 5 in one room and grades 5 - 8 in the other. Most people here 50 years of age and older only have an eighth grade education since the closest high school was in Newport.

I'm working on a very difficult, dark story right now. It's called "The Dark Hole". It's going to be the closest I've come to emulating the school of the Southern Grotesque as practiced by my influence Flannery O'Connor. I so love her, but I'm having a really hard time locating the subtle nuances of humor in this very dark, racially charged story. Also, I love these people up here so much, that I tend to turn a blind eye to the obviously grotesque in them. I know it's there...it's just really hard for me to look at.

It was long ago, and far away-ish (well, six hours down the interstate), and having nothing to do with Appalachia.

I'm not quite sure what the equivalent to this is. It's a past memory that keeps playing over and over in my head. A mnemonic earworm perhaps?

I have Kim Crawford over at Velociworld to thank for this. His post about the carillons of Atlanta and this phrase in particular....

And having the carillonneur get a lap dance during his performance of I Gave my Love a Cherry could add a sweet Marquis de Sade angle.

...was what started this. Damnit.

I was nineteen years old in 1980 and experienced the most surreal night of my life. Even though I was so young, I seemed to sense that it didn't get any stranger than this. But I reserved my judgement since I expected to have many, many more exciting things happen to me. And they did. But none more bizarre than this night.

My best friend, Therese, and I were in Dr. Bernie Dunlap's documentary film studies class. We were both madly in crush with him. Therese and I were very discriminating about our crushes. The sheer force and raw power of Dr. Dunlap's intellect made him particularly worthy. One day, as we sat near the front, hanging on his every word, he said something particularly smart. I looked over at Therese, and she had opened herself up like a flower on the auditorium chair. She then breathed out a loud and very long sigh. Everyone heard it...including Dr. Dunlap. He looked behind him as though he couldn't possibly be the cause of such an exhalation.

He had a way of blinking rather quickly before turning his attention upon you.

"Uh...yes?"

Therese blushed three shaded of red, and I, while I did not exactly shame myself by acting out what I was thinking, blushed with her.

He is president of Wofford College now. His hair has silvered but he's still quite the fox. All these years later, I still blush quietly as I watch Kurosawa.

It was for the incredible Dr. Dunlap that we made several treks to my small home town of Bluffton, S.C. We were making a student film for the class and decided that Bluffton would make a good subject. I think we had big ideas about making it a sort of kino-eye sort of thing, but I'm also relatively certain that neither of us had any idea what that really meant at the time. But what Vertov said...well, it just sounded real smart.

On one of our trips, we took along our good friend Jim. Jim was also in school with us. He actually would be a better person to tell this part of the story and he's always been an amazing storyteller. Jim was slight and had a foxy, clever face topped with a shock of ginger-colored hair. His eyes were a very light, light blue and sparkled with sly intelligence. Jim was also gay. This last bit of biographical information isn't at all gratuitous since it was Jim's gayness that got us into this mess.

One day, after a busy day of lugging around extremely heavy super-8 film equipment, we decided we deserved a night on the town in nearby Savannah. Being the good host that I was, I wanted to include Jim and show him some of the gay bars in Savannah. The problem was, that while I knew where all of the gay bars in Columbia were, I didn't know anything about Savannah's gay nightclub scene. It would have been entirely inappropriate to ask my parents about this, so we decided just to go and explore the city ourselves.

Therese and I both wore vintage 1940's dresses and threw some old vintage furs over them. I'd like to point out the weirdness of this in 1980 Savannah, GA. Savannah's become quite the cosmopolitan city since SCAD arrived. It's not unusual to see goth kids running about the streets these days but Savannah in 1980 was a preppy's wet dream.

I took them to some of my old haunts on River Street, then our search for a gay bar began in earnest. Oddly, none of the strangers we blindly approached on the street could tell us where to find a damn gay bar. I'm not sure what criteria we were using for choosing whom to ask, but it's a miracle that we didn't get the crap beat out of us. I suppose our youth and naivete gave us some small degree of protection.

I was quite frustrated at this point. So we headed up to Bay Street where I remembered a bar that I'd not been to before. It had a rather unsavory reputation and I thought, well, maybe it's a gay bar. I'd been warned to stay away from this place but no one ever really told me why.

The Lamp Post had been on the dark end of Bay Street for as long as I could remember. We parked the car across the street and got out. I suppose that having my two friends with me made me a bit braver than I should have been.

As we locked the doors to the car, a heckler drove by and shouted, "Hey! Carpet and Bedspread!"

I didn't quite understand it, but Therese caught right on. They were referring to our shabby chic vintage fur coats. I was crushed, but Therese seemed to think it was pretty funny. Hmmph.

We approached the darkened doorway with a bit of trepidation. I'm not sure who opened the door first. I remember the stale scent of beer and cigarettes that was even heavier than most bars. It's almost like that wet dog smell. But beer-y.

We walked in and barely had time to get our bearings when two rather tired-looking Asian women converged on Jim. They began chattering at him quite animatedly.

I couldn't quite make out what they were saying, since my eyes were too busy popping out of my head, but I remember him replying, "No, really...we are okay!" Then, "Thanks, but no...really." Then, "No, please, we'll just have a drink."

By the time Jim had convinced the very persistent and tired-looking Asian women that he was not in the market for whatever they were offering, we were inside The Lamp Post and committed to this particular adventure.

My first impression of the place was it was dark and red. The walls were papered in fuzzy velour-like paper. There was an oddly shaped bar with lights over it and poles emerging from it going up to the ceiling. Sort of like the poles firemen slide down. There was red shag carpet upholstering some surfaces. A line of booths was against a wall. There were a few small pool tables set into alcoves in the back. The floor was stickier than usual. The place seemed entirely populated with tired looking Asian women and sailors.

We absolutely should have left then. But for some reason, we felt it might be rude just to walk out without having a drink first.

Let me explain something about Southerners and our tradition of good manners. If one is brought up correctly, and the three of us certainly were, you are gifted by your parents with an almost pathological need to be polite. For one's first 25 years, good manners are dispersed in a shotgun-like fashion, without any particular focus or aim. You just do it, no matter what situation arises since it could take days to figure out if this is a situation in which one might be allowed to be less than polite.

Later, through experiences just like this, we gradually learn when it is acceptable to just walk away. But we weren't there yet.

We took seats at one of the booths and a tired-looking Asian woman came and took our drink orders. When our drinks came, we started revamping our battle plan. This, most certainly, was no gay bar. After a few sips of our drinks, Jim passed around a vial of "poppers".

Big mistake.

Under the residual effects of the poppers, Therese decided to go ask the Greek sailors in the pool room if they knew where a gay bar was.

Also under the residual effects of the poppers, Jim actually decided to use the men's room in this place.

Surprisingly the Greek sailors indeed knew where the gay bar was. Success at last! Who in the world would have believed that manly seamen from half-way around the world would know the location of a gay bar in Savannah, GA. I mean, who'd a thunk it? I figured it was just dumb luck.

Therese and I are sitting in the booth waiting for Jim to return from the men's room. He does seem to be in there for quite some time. While we are waiting when...unexpectedly and totally out of the blue...a naked Asian woman wearing only pasties and a g-string climbs up on the unusually shaped bar with the fireman poles. We both look at each other. Then we look at the Asian woman who is starting her act. Then we try very, very hard not to look at the Asian woman.

But it's really quite impossible since the booth we chose to sit in is about 10 feet from where she is using the fireman's pole in a most unorthodox fashion. A black man in a tattered army jacket pulls a pair of hand puppets out of his pocket and lets the puppets have a conversation with the woman's pelvis.

Who, for God's sake, brings puppets to a strip bar?

Did he just start to walk out the door to go to the strip bar and go, "Oops, wait a minute...almost forgot my puppets. Can't be without those at the strip bar."

I just can't seem to avert my eyes quickly enough and they keep being pulled back to this Fellini-esque scene.

Jim finally returns from the men's room. His face is white and his freckles stand out in sharp relief to his pale skin. He describes the men's room as being a bloodbath of crushed red velour and shag carpeting.

Evidently, there was a very large black woman in a red lace teddy who had taken up residence in one of the men's bathroom stalls.

Jim, the polite young Southern man that he is, thought immediately he's made the faux pas of entering the lady's facilities.

"Oh, please," he said, "I beg your pardon!"

Before Jim can make a graceful exit, the large black woman says, "Tha's alright, honey! Come on in!"

Evidently, he wasn't in the wrong place.

We decide to leave what was left of our drinks and make our way to the gay bar that the Greek sailors so kindly gave us directions to. We are quiet on the way there. Each of us processing what we'd just experienced. We knew we had just had one of those experiences that we would tell over and over again. It was to become one of our myths, our legends.

I remember the relief I felt when we entered the clean, safe confines of the gay bar. Everything was polished hardwood and trac lighting. Nice smelling gay people were milling about laughing. A drag show was going on up on the stage. A pleasant androgynous man took me up on a game of backgammon and flirted with me.

I flirted back.

The land her family used to own is now a wide, smooth lake that rolls up its shores each winter. In the summer, the TVA lets the water flow in and the banks of mud are once more serene stretches of liquid. You can still see the road that went through that once lovely farmland in the winter. They left the grain silos and only those peek out of the water during the summer. It's called Dutch Bottoms.

You have to be careful about waterfront property in Tennessee. Half the year, your lakefront home looks out onto vistas of mud.

Her grand daddy was advised to move "high up" for his health. It was just in time, for the TVA was taking over the land to make Douglas Lake. They bought most of Hall Top Mountain and the clan moved there. Most of that land is out of the family now, but they still have a huge reunion up there each year.

Her father met her mother while walking down the Old Fifteenth with his fiddle strapped on his back on his way to a revival meeting. She was doing the laundry on a big rock in the stream. That rock is still there. They began meeting there on a regular basis, but she was forbidden to see boys, so it was on the quiet. They decided to run away together and on the next laundry day, her mother wore her good clothes under her laundry smock and they ran off to Clayton, Georgia and got hitched.

Her family moved around a good bit, her father chasing jobs in the cotton mills of South Carolina, before coming back to the mountain. He was a stern and unforgiving man. He had spent his youth wildly, playing his fiddle at dances and frequenting gospel meetings. It was perhaps his youthful experiences that made him so very strict with his daughters. A hard man to love well. He was cruel at times. She wonders if he'll be there in the afterlife.

Once, she wore a new pair of shoes to church. It was a five mile walk and her feet were raw. She had been forbidden to accept rides from boys, but just this once she did, since she could barely walk. Her father beat her within an inch of her life for that transgression.

The last time he beat her, she swore she'd kill him if he touched her again. He didn't and she left her home to go out in the world.

When she was growing up in that stern household, they lived on a farm on what is now Coggins road. They just tore the old farmhouse down. Often she'd comment on what a pretty farm her daddy had over there with the land all cleared and whatnot. The new people hadn't kept the place up in her eyes. They had a penchant for saving old machinery and cars and the stretch of road that her family once lived on was now decorated with hundreds…maybe thousands…of junk automobiles.

That family has an interesting story. Their daddy was a scout for geological surveyors up here in these hills. It was said that he knew where all of the rich mineral deposits were, hidden beneath the shifting stone of the hills. He couldn't read but he could dowse for minerals with eerie proficiency. My neighbors told me that there was a story that when the old man died, he had stored all sorts of gem stones in the junk cars. So the boys had to be careful what they threw away since their inheritance was hidden in old engine blocks.

The men of this family have a curse. They all die young at exactly the same age. At least most of them. Enough to make the men nervous.

She remembers the nights spent in that old house. She remembered waking up in the middle of the night as a child screaming. Huge Norway rats infested the farmhouse when they first moved in and they'd often awaken to find rat bites on their faces and necks. She has an uneasy relationship with the wildlife up here. She is terrified of snakes after having come across a nest of them mating in the creek. She says there were hundreds of the things intertwined there in the water. She still has nightmares about them.

Life was hard here, but the memories are now softened with time. In deep winter her father would wrap all of the children's legs in burlap sacks for the three mile trudge through the snow, crossing frozen creeks, to the school house. They didn't have a way to take the burlap off and would have to wear the sacks all through the school day.

The delicious freedom she experienced when she left home to work in the Magnavox factory in Greeneville was short-lived, but she traded it for the life she has had all these years, with the man she loved. They raised five strong children and farmed. It was a good life.

Her husband died nine years ago. She recalls the winter night he passed with clarity and tears up as she speaks of it. She still keeps his name on her door and her phone listing still bears his name. It's very much like he is still living at times when she speaks of him.

They had a wood stove for heat at that time. The night was wickedly cold and bitter and he was loading the stove with firewood.

As he placed crammed too many "night logs" in the firebox, she chided him about it.

"You best not be doin' that," she said, "You're gonna drive us out of the house and then where would we go?"

He wisecracked at her as he often did, "Guess I'd better find another place to sleep, then."

"Shall I pack your bags fer you?" She cracked back at him.

Her eyes tear up and she says to me, "I weren't being mean, this was just what we always said to each other."

I could so see the easy nature of their relationship. The deep love and level of comfort they had reached with each other during their long lives together.

He had indeed overloaded the stove that night. The creosote jammed the flue and smoke began to billow through the house. He had already gone to bed, leaving her to deal with the mess. She went through the house closing off doorways in an attempt to contain the smoke billowing into the house.

"I guess I should have checked on him, but I didn't." She said, missing him with every breath. Loving him with every single piece of herself.

He died in his sleep during the night.

Sometimes I take her out for a drive and she points out to me the ghosts of the thriving community that once lived here. The mountains are jealous of the land we take for our use. Places that fifty years ago were homesteads are now forest. All that remains of her childhood and young adulthood here are in many cases a teetering stone chimney left on a spot where she once laughed and danced.

I can sense the sadness in her when she points out a stretch of forest and says, "Back whence I was young, that was the prettiest farm with all sorts of beautiful flowers."

Sometimes when we are driving about, she will break into song. Her voice is sweet and melodic and mixed with the dissonances that typify atonal singing up here.

We will wind around the mountain roads singing "I'll Fly Away".

It's that time of year again.

I took this photo last year down at the Hartford Exxon which has now been fancied up into the Pigeon River Smokehouse. Their barbeque is okay. I'm something of a barbeque snob though, so it's hard to please me. Once you've been spoiled by the likes of The Pink Pig or Maurice Bessinger's Piggie Park...well, it's just hard to please me in respect to barbeque.

Now, I tried really hard to boycott Maurice's back in 2000 when all of the debate was going on. And it's true...he's a terrible racist. But the siren song of pulled pork cooked slowly over oak embers and tangy mustardy sauce would draw me back to my shameful addiction. Boy howdy, the man knows his pig. Guess it takes one to know one that well.

His brother, Thomas, also has outstanding barbeque in Charleston. I actually prefer it to Maurice's and they also have the most amazing onion rings that are coated in a puffy sweet bread-like coating.

I don't know how I got on this tangent about barbeque when I actually meant to talk about bear hunting, but I guess I'm just waxing nostalgic for the foods and sights of my homeland in coastal South Carolina. But there is something about barbeque and hound dogs that just seems to fit so well together.

The Tennessee barbeque is okay, it's just not something to dream about. Or maybe I haven't gotten out like I used to and roamed in search of the perfect piece of pig.

So, back to bear hunting.

Every year about this time, they hunt the black bears that are everywhere here. The hunters use dogs. There will be one dog that is the lead pack dog and the most valuable one, who sits on top of the dog box in the back of the truck and sounds when he gets the scent.

They've gotten very high tech here with this sport. The lead dogs are outfitted with GPS collars. The hunters can be seen standing around with little satellite dishes trying to pinpoint where the dogs have got the bear treed or cornered.

I remember the hunter who had these dogs told me that they had almost lost a few dogs when the bear turned on them the day before these photos were shot.

They have lots of bear hunting clubs here. My favorite is the "Po' Boys Bear Club". I was quite covetous of their club T-shirts. I really really wanted one. Off season, the clubs involve themselves with bear conservation. Last year they rescued a cub, not an itty bitty one...just one that had gone off from its mother recently. He'd fallen in the French Broad and the Bear Club members went and rescued him and got him to the wildlife rehabilitator.

I grew up in a family of hunters and fishermen. I still enjoy going on a squirrel hunt now and again and I still love to fish.

This has been a really news filled year for Black Bear. We had the death of a young child in the Cherokee National Forest earlier this year. People were on high alert after that. They caught and killed one bear that turned out not to be the culprit before finding the one that did. I think I heard they found human DNA on the one they finally decided was the one who killed the kid. I remember driving through Cherokee on my way to Bryson City to pick up my new bucks and saw the rangers out with their sniper rifles. Everyone was a little jumpy after that.

Then, some idiot in Gatlinburg got out of his car to go after his unleashed dog who was going after a mother and her two cubs and almost got whacked. The mother bear did get whacked in the end and the two cubs ended up being raised by wildlife rehabilitators.

I haven't seen a live bear since I came here, though I often hear the hounds running them through the woods. I did see a magnificent bear that a hunter had shot and was taking to the game station. I'd never been that close to one before.

They eat the meat here. It seems that men really love it, but most of the women I've spoken to don't care for it much. I haven't had an opportunity to try it yet. I'm hoping to get some bear fat this season to render down into lard to make soap with. We'll see.

I was told when I first came here that if a man brings you a bear haunch that it is tantamount to a marriage proposal.

Of course, you get to be the one to cook it.

I'll stick with barbeque for now.

The Indians called this place "Shaconage". The land of blue smoke. It fairly seems to cry out for misty figures who fade in the fog and leave no footsteps in the wet springs where they tread.

But the reality and history here is so much more fascinating. I have yet to hear one ghost tale related to me by someone who actually grew up here.

Once, I brought a couple of filmmaker friends from Asheville to visit a local woman. They had come to visit me for the day and wanted to make a film based on Appalachian ghost stories. I really didn't have any ideas for them, but was able to get her to retell my favorite eerie, but true story.

There is a sheer rock face across from my house. It rises three hundred feet in the air from her north pasture. The top was once cleared and a small homestead used to sit on the edge of cliff. A young woman with two children lived up there with her old father. They farmed the steep slopes on the other side with steers.

They used to plant corn in places no one could plant today. You can still see the little terraces on the sides of the mountains where the steers pulled the plows.

She was married once. But the man took off to live with another woman down in the holler, leaving her with the two babies, a toddler and an infant.

I'm not sure exactly what the grim tale was about the relationship between the girl and her father. Maybe he was just mean as a snake. Maybe he drank. I'm just not sure, but for whatever reason, the two did not get along. She was dutiful, though, and was taking care of him in his later years.

It happened on one of those cold, cold nights we have here in the mountains. The sleet and snow was hitting the tin roof of the cabin, being driven by 40 mile per hour gusts. The wind sounded like a panther cry, like a woman screaming. It was on a night like this that the old man decided to die.

As he lay dying by inches and on his last night on earth, he cursed his girl.

"Mark my words, girl," he told her, "for as sure as I'll die on this night, I'll come back and haunt you. I'll drive you mad for sure. You see if I don't!"

As the warmth seeped out of his now dead body in the middle of a cold winter night, the daughter made up her mind. She bundled up her two young ones and scaled down the cliff with them in the dark, in the snow and driving ice and wind. She arrived at the woman's house seeking shelter late that wintery night.

Her hands were cut and torn from her climb down the sheer rock face. She had bruises over most of her body and was shuddering with cold. It was a miracle that she didn't plummet to her death. It was a greater miracle that neither of the babies had a scratch on them.

The next morning she left the two babies with their father and went to Knoxville. She checked herself into what was then known as the "Sanatorium" but is now the State Mental Institution. I suppose she expected her dead father to make good on his promise to drive her insane, and thought it best to be in an appropriate place when it happened.

Many years later, the woman tried to go get her and bring her home, thinking the fear might have gone out of her.

The woman looked at her over the steaming vats of laundry with haunted eyes.

"This would be my home now." she told her.

She lived out the remainder of her days at the Sanatorium, patiently waiting to go insane.

There are no ghosts here. The dead still live with the living.

I fall in love with dead people. It's an unfortunate habit of mine.

Last spring, I made a pilgrimage to visit the graves of two women who had captured my affections, though I'd never met them. If I had only come here a few years earlier, I could have actually met them and spoken with them. To me, this is like visiting the ruins of the great library of Alexandria. I have no idea what treasures they took with them, but I'm sure they had stories to tell me. Almost two hundred years of life experience on these hills lay buried here.

It was early spring and the trilliums were coming up and the water was high in the creek. I wandered around their barn and checked out the ramps patch they had planted. Pulling one up, I tasted the garlicky sweetness of the leaves before starting the long hike up the mountain, with ramps on my breath. The smell of spring here is green, damp and cool. It smells like snow melting up in the Gulf.

I first heard of Martha and Lizie from the Busbee family. They were long-time neighbors of the girls and even the youngsters remember the two fondly. They were twin sisters, spinsters, who lived with each other their entire lives. They were born in 1906, which would have put them at the right age to have attended the mission school where Catherine Marshall's mother, Leonora, taught. I don't know if they actually went to that school, but the conditions here were in keeping to that time period.

This is a harsh environment for a woman to live alone in now. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them, but at least they had each other.


Mrs. Busbee remembers the girls in their prime. They were quite the two beauties. They had long blue-black hair, caramel-colored skin and the light colored eyes that may have pointed to a Melungeon ancestry. She remembers seeing them sitting out on the rocks in the middle of the creek singing and washing their long black hair. I'm reminded of the siren's scene from Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou when I think of them in their youth.

I asked her why they never married. Evidently one of them almost did, but it didn't work out. Neither could stand to leave the other. They were both very devoted to their parents and gave up their lives to care for them. By the time their Daddy died at 102 years of age, the girls were 56 years old. Their mother died six years later at the age of 103. By then the girls were 61 and the days of wine and roses were long past. From what I know of Martha and Lizie, they never considered this a sacrifice.

Their lives were long, but hard. They farmed burley tobacco and their barn still stands on the property. Growing tobacco is brutal work that involves suckering the plants, tying it up on sticks and hanging the crop to dry in a well ventilated barn. The nicotine can enter your bloodstream from your hands as you handle the plants making you sick and headachey. Most everyone here has the experience of working tobacco.

The remnants of their life were still there, scattered about the floor of their cabin. No one had been here in the six years since they died so it had been broken into and animals were using it as shelter. But here and there were little vestiges of their lives. An unwashed tea cup sat by the sink and unwashed dishes were waiting for someone to come along and tidy up. Sun blasted canning jars waiting for summer. And most poignantly, a rack of clothes hanging, waiting for someone to get dressed for church. Untouched. Six years.

Needlework was their passion. They constructed some of the most beautiful quilts known to these parts. In a dreadful miscommunication, some distant relatives in Georgia bragged to their delinquent sons about how there was a fortune in those quilts. The boys thought that meant there was actual money sewed into the skilfully designed and executed quilts. So they made a road trip to rob the old women.

The girls were beaten within an inch of their lives and left for dead by the nephews. The boys ransacked the cabin and stole everything of value. Most tragically, they ripped apart all of Martha and Lizie's quilts looking for the "fortune". The fortune they left shredded in a million pieces all over the floorboards of the cabin.

Luckily, neighbors found the girls and got them to the hospital. The nephews were caught and sent to jail. How betrayed they must have felt by this.

But, by far my favorite remembrance of the girls is the story of the Cat Fur Jelly.

Martha and Lizie were overly fond of cats. No one is really sure how many cats they had. I believe it was over 50 though it's hard to tell here since cats tend to form feral colonies easily. It's possible that even Martha and Lizie didn't know how many cats they had. In their later years, it was said that the girls even smelled of cats. No one said anything since they were so beloved in the community.

A relative from Florida gifted the girls with several crates of citrus fruit one year. It was way too much for the two of them to eat without it going bad. Like everyone in the mountain community, Lizie and Martha canned fruits, vegetables and jams and jellies for the winter months. So, the girls decided to make a big ol' batch of marmalade with all of that beautiful fruit. They put up a gang of jars of the stuff with the fruit in their tiny little kitchen.

Come Christmas, they went around giving gifts of the beautiful orange jam. Everyone was ever so pleased.

Mrs. Busbee was one of the recipients. She held that jar of jam up to the light and it was fairly swimming in cat hair.

I'm sure the girls were never told. Mountain folk are just too kindly to make such a thing known.

It was a long hike up the mountain to their grave site. They were buried in one of those little family graveyards so common here. It seemed that no one had visited here since they were buried in 1999. This made me sad. Everyone is so concerned about keeping the graves tended here. They put "fresh" artificial flowers on the graves each season and think kindly of their dead relatives. Even the graves of the forgotten are tended as long as they are in one of these small cemeteries. But Martha and Lizie were the last of their branch, I suppose.

They even had their own gravestones made before they died. They knew this would be their fate. And I suppose it will be my own one day.

Someone had placed a huge, beautiful conch shell on top of their headstone. I wondered who had done that and what it must have meant. Did they take a trip to the beach once and play in the ocean? Was there some happy memory shared between who left this and the two?

I don't think they mind that in six years, only some stranger has made the trek up the mountain to see them. I hope they know that I only had the best intentions. I need them to be remembered because they truly are beautiful to me.

Sleep tight, sweet girls. I will remember you.

I'm just putting a short post in tonight. It's Sunday and I usually take a bit of time off from writing on Sunday. But the deal is that I must write something.

A friend came over to my house and we watched Brokeback Mountain. This is not the sort of film that shows at the Newport CinemaPlex. Well, I started choking up around the last time they see each other and it was downhill from there. I'm glad I didn't see it in a movie theater because I would have quite shamed myself. I'm not one of those people who weeps tidily. There are some women who manage to look quite lovely as tears trace out of their eyes. That's just not me. When I'm by myself, I can really rip loose with a good cry. But since I had company, I did try to restrain myself. A bit.

There's just something lovely and cathartic about a good cry. I feel like the ground must feel after a nice hard rain.

Then we got on the subject somehow of domestic violence in the community.

I think we were talking about getting "whoopin's" as children. My parents never laid a hand on me when I was growing up. They never needed to. My mother was gifted with "the look". This sort of way that she looked at you and pursed her lips that was absolutely unquestionable. It was worse than being hit. In a second, my mother could telepathically convey all sorts of horrors that would occur(but never did) if I did not immediately cease whatever it was that I was doing.

The conversation segued into domestic violence. The women here are very strong. The men have good reason to be afraid of them and if not of them, then of their male relatives. If someone threatens to kill you up here, it's definitely not a joke.

There is this tale of a woman who lived up the road more towards Del Rio. Her husband was known to take a violent turn when he got all likkered up. This one evening he came home drunk, no doubt on some of the excellent white lightning that is made up here. They tell me our community supplies the Tennessee State House with hooch, it's that good. It also makes excellent vanilla extract and elderberry cordial. Not that I'd know or anything, but it only costs 6 bucks a quart.

The husband takes a swipe at the wife and then passes out in the bed. She gets out her needle and thread and sews him up in the sheet on the bed. Then, she goes out and finds a stout stick and proceeds to beat the crap out of him, all the while him being unable to escape from his "shroud".

I'm not sure how he managed to extricate himself from this situation. I imagine that is a tale unto itself. But he left her after that. Told all his buddies that he was afraid to be in the same house with her.

I love that story.

Payback is certainly a bitch.

I'm tired. I have that punchy feeling where you can feel your blood vibrating in your veins.

I hate that.

I was just falling asleep this morning as the dawn charged over the horizon. I'm not sure why I stayed up all night, but I just did. So when the phone rang at eleven, I wasn't really half awake. But six hours is better than nothing.

So...I got nothin' for you today. I'm really really happy with Little Men. That's the sort of work I do when I'm well rested.

This morning was warmish in a weird way and the clouds came closing in on the blue sky. By afternoon it began. Great white globby snow flakes. I so love the first snow. I had to run to the store and stood out in it for a moment. In a moment of madness, I lifted my head to the sky and stuck out my tongue, letting those icy clumps fall and melt. They felt like little fairy needles.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion. I experienced a rare moment of Zen seeing on my way home. I stopped the jeep by the "Rope Hole", a local swimming hole with a rope swing. I saw the snowflakes falling on the rushing mountain water in a moment of crystal clarity. I zoomed in with my entire being to the moment before the snowflakes hit the water. I think they seemed to pause for a moment, as though knowing death was near.

I have no words to describe how unspeakably beautiful this was. It was a visual haiku.

But I have no words for you now. I'd just drown you in adjectives.

They started showing up when I hit my thirties. They may have been there before and I just failed to notice them. Suddenly, they would be there. Creeping up on dirty, bare feet; cutting glances in my direction; shy, they were, like small, feral creatures in the snow.

"What'cha doin'?"

Sometimes they brought gifts. Bull frog tadpoles in jars, deer skulls or other assorted bones, fresh trout just caught, ducks just shot or rabbits and animal skins. I have graciously accepted these offerings and let them watch as I placed the tadpoles in small porch aquariums to mature, proudly displayed the bones, cleaned the fish and dressed the game and birds. The latter would sometimes include an anatomy lesson.

"See that? You don't want to cut that...it's a bile duct and it's connected to the liver. You have one inside you too!"

They would come by bike, by foot and once in a while on horseback. Sometimes they timed their entrance to the start of the barbecue grill. Sometimes they came with questions, sometime tears and sometimes to rescue me.

I've always called them my army of little boys. Puck's friends. My little men.

I don't know why they came. I have no idea what it is about me that draws 9 to 13 year old boys to my doorstep. There was one girl once. She was a corn-rowed tomboy with sickle cell. She would arrive on her bike with the rest of the gang wearing a backwards baseball cap and a snaggle-tooth grin. Some days she wasn't there. She was in the hospital.

When I lived in Columbia, I was in graduate school. My hours were irregular and involved long nights at the theatre. So I would be home during the day when the latch-key gangs of the Olympia neighborhood were running wild in the streets. Before long, every one's Mom had my phone number so they could call their wayward offspring home.

"Is he over there bothering you again?"

"No...it's okay. He's just cleaning out the tadpole nursery. Do you need me to send him home?"

"His dinner's ready."

"No problem...I'll see that he heads out right away."

Olympia was a really cool neighborhood. It was an old textile mill village with wonderful old homes dating back to the turn of the century. Most of the original people who settled there were from the Appalachians. You can find these mill villages all over the eastern seaboard. Folk from the mountains would leave in droves to work in the textile mills. Most would work through the cold winter and return home to "make a garden" in the spring. This is a fairly common story heard here. Sometimes entire families would go. Children as young as five were put to work in the mills doing dangerous things that only quick small fingers could do.

Sometimes they lost those fingers.

Most of the families here in Grassy Fork have some sort of mill heritage. Some stayed behind and settled permanently in the mill villages. These people were called "lint heads". The term started as a pejorative but now, it has been reclaimed. It's rarely used in a negative sense anymore. The interesting thing is that no matter how many generations removed from the mountains, the people who stayed seemed to hang on for dear life to their Appalachian heritage. These villages for a while, before gentrification, were little oasis' of mountain culture plopped down in the middle of major cities.

If what happened to me in Olympia had not happened, I would have gladly stayed there.

I really loved it there; my mill house looking out over the abandoned mill, my lint head neighbors, Granny Wilson with her purple hair and feral chihuahuas and my army of little boys.

Two of them, brothers, were frequent visitors. Ryan and Jeremy. Ryan was of the age where he would excitedly relate stories that I'm sure, his mother would rather not have spread around.

"Miss Rosanne! Guess what WE did! Momma an' me...we went over to her ol' boyfriend's house...you know...the really mean one? We slashed his water bed and water...well...it like went ever'where!"

The mill house they lived in was catty-corner to mine. The yard decorations were simply wonderful. For a while, a toilet graced the front yard with one of those little fishing boy statuaries seated on top of the tank and fishing into the bowl of the toilet. I thought it inspired. They hung sheets in the trees for Halloween and you never knew what was going to show up there at Christmas.

One day, as Jeremy was walking with me and my dogs, he got a quizzical look on his face.

"My Momma, she says you're a 'dite'."

I cut my eyes at him. I could tell he was confused.

"So Jeremy. Do you know what a 'dite' is?" I asked, repeating the mispronunciation.

"Well, sure!" he replied with a bit of false bravado. "I've got lots of friends at school who are boys and there's nothin' wrong with that."

"Indeed."

I really loved my life there. I loved those people.

When I moved here, a new crop started coming up to visit. They would show up with pellet guns and bare feet. It always amazes me how the mountain children can run and scamper over the sharp rocks. I forbade them to come on the property without shoes. It took a few times to get them to obey. I still have projects that little boys like to help with. Building a rabbit trap just like the one my grandfather built for me. Holding lengths of wood steady while my circular saw rips the wood. Tending to newly hatched chicks or bottle-feeding baby goats. Gigging frogs in the pond.

It's an army of one right now. Only one left...my amazing helper, Adam. Adam at 11 can start any two cycle engine capable of starting. He has climbed down the cliff to retrieve dogs and goats. He's helped me run fences. He's a great kid. It seems sometimes that he's carrying around a very old soul.

As I said, I have no idea what draws them to me. Perhaps it is because my own interests, my simple pleasures, have remained fairly juvenile. I enjoy gigging for frogs. I like building rabbit traps and the breathless anticipation each day as you check them. I love a walk in the woods with my .22 hunting squirrels with my dogs or fishing in the creek. I like to go down to the creek on the hottest day of the year and swim in the ice cold water. Finger painting is fun and ever so sensual (remember the squishy feel of the tempera and that amazing smell?). These things still hold great pleasure to me. I still like doing the things I liked doing when I was 10. Except eating paste. I gave that up.

Just as mysteriously, they vanish. Like the litter of possums I hand raised, they disappear into the woods of young adulthood, clambering over the fallen leaves of their experiences. Sometimes, as with Ryan and Jeremy, I never hear from them again. I can only hope that some gift from me goes forth with them. I sometimes wonder where they are. If they are on some lonely desert fighting for their lives. If they have enough to eat. How many times has their heart been broken.

I'll never know. It is my way to walk softly in this world.

But sometimes...sometimes...I hope rather desperately that they still like to watch tadpoles grow into frogs.

I wake up this morning to a crisply, cold mountain morning. The quality of the light is just a wee bit hazy, but the sky is that amazing robin's egg blue that offsets the starkness of the winter landscape here.

I wonder if there is any snow up on Snowbird? Usually, when the temps drop this dramatically at my elevation, the high reaches are all craggy and snowy. The winds sweep down from Le Conte and Snowbird to chill us. If I'm this cold on my aerie, I know it must be really cold down in the holler.

I just read Catherine Marshall's Christy. I'd been putting off reading it since I knew that I was going to be writing about this place and it already had one well-known work written about it. Of course, I'm writing first hand and almost a hundred years later than Marshall. I'm also not fictionalizing. I think what struck me the most was how little the physical environs of the place had changed in a hundred years. There are definitely improvements...the typhoid and other serious illnesses aren't a problem thanks to modern well digging. I've walked back to the old springs that used to supply water here. They are pretty scary. Few are still being used. There is still the off person who has no indoor plumbing or running water. One of my close neighbors is one of them. After reading about the connection to typhoid and the springs, I now worry about Hammer. He's been digging a spring out near his house so he does not have to drive down the road to the artesian spring at the little church on Hall's Top to get water.

The Big Mud Hole was finally paved over last year when they started black topping The Old 15th. When I first moved here a few years ago...that wet spring was still causing problems. I've been up to the site of the Christy mission. I'm always a bit surprised by how small the footprints of the old structures are. So many people living in such small places. Easier to heat.

One thing that struck me about the book was that Marshall didn't shy away from the negative aspects of the people here. I realized that I've been doing that. I suppose I'm just so madly in love with the mountains and the mountain people that it's easier for me to turn a blind eye to that which is less beautiful than I'd like it to be. In a way, my first hand experience here keeps me from looking too closely and that is something I need to work on.

The terrible diseases here have been replaced, unfortunately. The three main scourges here are clinical depression, prescription drug addiction with methamphetamine addiction running a close third. My feeling is that the latter two are efforts to self-medicate the first. I have no science to back this up, but my feeling is that depression is something that is "bred in the bone" to these folk. A modern day Dr. MacNeill would no doubt be researching genetic markers for depression in the people up here.

They have a truly profound fascination with death and dying. The passages in Christy where Fairlight Spencer is watching the shadows overtake the mountain ranges, I see as being a metaphor for this obsession. I know exactly what that looks like. It's really very beautiful as seen from my high perch. The shadow is like a great hand reaching out to snuff out the twilighted candles of the mountains. It really is a perfect metaphor for the approach of death.

The local churches seem to feed this fascination. The stress is upon the afterlife rather than Christ-like behavior. Their beliefs are both narrowly defined and unambitious. One's entrance to paradise is guaranteed by mere belief. I feel strongly that one's actions, deportment and honor toward others (and Christ is as good an example to follow as any but the concept exists in all world religions) is key in being spiritually healthy. After all, if there is no one, or no reason for one to keep living...why bother? We need to be needed.

I talked with a friend about this concept. She smiled and said, "My husband liked to say that 'your faith should have legs'." Exactly. That's exactly what I mean. But, being the dunderhead that I am, I couldn't say it in five simple words.

People like to think the worst of people here. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it but it's almost titillating. There is a sort of gleeful glint in their eye when gossiping about someone who has committed a mortal sin in their eyes.

"Bless their heart. They are going to burn in hell."

As I mentioned in my "Picking out my Handbasket" post...this doesn't mean that they won't be your good friend, even if you are, after all, going to be doomed to hellfire.

Unfortunately, because of the prescription painkiller problem up here, many pain patients go without much needed pain meds. We have a cancer patient or two blow their brains out or commit suicide by some other means each year. Suicide seems to be a generally well accepted method of pain management here...but...

"Bless their heart. They are going to burn in hell."

I have a buddy who is facing an identity crisis right now. He was raised elsewhere but shares the same genes as the rest of the folk here. He's got a double shot of the depression gene and I honestly can't think of a worse place to try to discover one's identity than Grassy Fork. It's a great place to come to if you already have a firm grasp on who and what you are. I dealt with these issues 15 years ago and the pain of doing so is still quite vivid in my memory. His faith is quite strong and is of the ilk of these mountains. I think he is half worried about the burning in hell thing. I suggested he go to MCC or some other more tolerant faith...at least for the time being. But he enjoys the fire and brimstone.

I vividly remember Old Red down at the dump asking me if I thought "boys or girls were 'purtier' ". His sly mountain way of questioning my sexual preference when I first moved here. I honestly wasn't expecting that degree of frank inquiry. My coming here by myself was very suspect to the mountain folk. My easy reply was, "Well, Red. I think all of God's creatures are 'purty" in their own special way." And I do believe that. And with me...purty has nothing at all to do with it. Purty is as purty does, I always say.

Bless my heart. I'm going to burn in hell.

This is place to retreat from the world...not to find your place in it. The world here is nothing like the world out there. This place is very Brigadoonish in that respect. I was ready to leave the world when I came here, and this makes my isolation not merely bearable, but welcome. Many come here to seek peace and I think you have to have that within yourself to truly be happy here.

Of course I would love to have someone to share this with. That's possibly my one regret in this life...my seeming inability for form a life bond outside of friendship with another person. I console myself by knowing that platonic bonds are classically considered the highest form of love. And I consider romantic love to be a form of mental illness anyway. Still.

But I'm at peace that evidently, that isn't what the Big Picture has in mind for me.

And at 45, I've completely squandered whatever "Purty" I may have had at one time.

I think it was Terry Pratchett who said, "There is a reason why religions start in deserts or in high places. The stars are so close at night and make you feel so insignificant that you just have to put something in the way."

Come here and drink the night sky...or stay and go mad from the sheer weight of it.

Well. It's been almost a year since I posted. I'm a slacker. I've been neglecting Buzznet and Flikr so it's not just the blog.

You know, I'm still pissed off about Katrina.

But I'm much more at ease now that the balance of power has been restored in Washington. I stayed up all night waiting for the mid-term election results to come in. Woo-Boy-Howdy...I was doing the happy hillbilly dance of joy!

I feel much safer now. So, I can start writing again. Hopefully more about this strange place I live which just seems to never get boring.

I've been paring down on the livestock. I just have one chicken left. He is named "Mr. Chicken". I only have three geese left. Some of them flew off the 300 foot cliff just outside my back door and landed in the cow pasture. They are still down there but have now become community geese. I wish the three I have left would join them. It's damn near impossible to navigate the yard without landing in goose poop. I've decided to focus on the goats and the dogs.

I have two gorgeous new Nubian bucks. The herd is up to 10 head now and my new boys have bred all the does. I'm expecting kids in January. Not the greatest time for babies since it is pretty chilly here in late January and early February. I'm probably going to have to pull the doe kids and bring them in the house to bottle raise. So I'll have babies running about in diydies and onesies. I was planning to put Lucky in the freezer, but I just haven't been able to bring myself to do the deed. My freezer is also completely full of veggies from this past summer's garden so there is no room for cabritto. The garden was almost too successful and I was really busy with it all summer. My brandywine tomatoes did especially well and I put up about two dozen quarts of marinara sauce. I've got my eye on some unusual French winter squash for next year. I always bite off more than I can chew with that damn garden. It's a gang of work for one person weeding and tending a quarter acre plot. My watermelons were amazing this year! And the pumpkins were great too! I made some outstanding pies with the pumpkins. They were heirloom stock from a local garden. I got some amazing sunflowers and got some really good photos of bees on them. I think they are up on both Flikr and Buzznet.

When things are so beautiful...you just want to stay alive and enjoy it all.

The start of bear season kicked off. Big Creek Market and Deli has a hand-written sign on the front door proclaiming that they will be open at 5 a.m. for bear hunters. Heard a guy from Knoxville got a really big one on the first day out. I have my request in to a bear hunter to get me a big tub of bear fat. I'm going to render it down and make some soap with it. That's the other thing I've gotten really caught up in over the past year. Making soap. I sell it on my petfinder site to support the cocker spaniel rescue. One of my more successful batches involved getting local raw honey and wax from the beekeeper down the road.

I finished the Angel Dogs Calendar and it's up on Cafe Press. I'm sort of embarrassed by the Angel Dogs thing. I mean, I spend boucoup de years getting my MFA and all those years as a wigmaster for film and television, costume designer...blah, blah, blah... and I actually do know what good art looks like. I'm actually capable of doing good art. And I end up sticking wings on dogs in heaven. An artist friend described them as being frighteningly rococco. And it's true. They are. But people really like them and pay me money to do them. And I don't have to mess up the studio getting my watercolors and prismacolors out. I do have some standards. I draw the line at "sofa-sized" paintings.

Though I do feel I need a break from photoshop and illustrator. I wish there was a life studies class closer than Asheville. I really need a tune-up on my human figure work. It's just not the same working from books and photos. Even the losest, sketchiest life drawings look better than working from photos. I had one that I did during the class at Rythymfest one year that I really loved. Which is unusual for me since I don't usually get attached to my studies. I liked that one though.

Anyway...that's what's been going on...at least part of it for me. I'm going to start working more on the stories.

So...my apologies to all of you who have written saying you've read the stories over and over and want more. I'm going to start afresh tomorrow. I think it may be an introspective piece. Who I am, where I am, and how that's workin' out for me.