Cherishing memories of the old ways
It was a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, and I was chafing. Perhaps you saw me. I was that 65-ish guy with sunglasses and a ball cap standing outside the REACH second-hand store in downtown Hazelwood. My lovely wife, my beautiful daughter and my spectacular three-month-old grandson are inside, browsing.
These are my people, my tribe, those I’d do anything for, literally cut off my arm or yank out my eyeballs if that’s what they needed, but shopping on a fall afternoon is not my idea of fun, not with a light breeze gently twisting the leaves back and forth as they try to hang on to the tree limb, the glinting sun making orange sparklers of those leaves right in front of me.
The anxiety eases a bit as a I continue to ponder the trees and the leaves and the sky. So I stand and wait, not patiently, but I wait, my shoulder against the building, considering that I may be bad for REACH’s business, elderly ladies with pockets full of money choosing to pass by rather than get too close to this man standing right beside the entryway. Hands thrust in my pockets, I eye the bench across the street, thinking it a more appropriate perch.
Then I see familiar faces departing from Blue Ridge Books. Lori and I had just listened to Ron Rash and his daughter talk and read. I think there were 12 of us listening to a writer many consider the most accomplished Appalachian scribe of our time. The banter between Ron and his daughter, Caroline, was light, heartfelt, even funny. She’s a poet with her first book just published. Her poems were serious and contemplative. She wore a shirt proclaiming her support for public schools. My wife, the retired ESL teacher, complimented her afterward as we hung around and chatted with them.
I connected with the fact that Caroline Rash is a writer. And she’s a teacher. And she’s navigating life in this very strange time this country is going through. If your vocation is to write relevant and meaningful poetry, welcome to 2025, a time when there’s plenty of material.
Ron, though he didn’t try to steal the show, was the star. He’s a master who is getting his due. And he’s also quite the raconteur. His genuine Southern accent is something that’s not as common as it once was, and my ear is tickled by accents and dialects. When I hear a person with a strong mountain or Southern accent, I can’t help but comment on it and ask questions about their upbringing.
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I connected with Ron’s stories and also his upbringing, his description of spending each summer in the mountains with his grandparents from the time he was 10 until he graduated high school. He told the group that their drinking water came from a spring, and a fresh trout living in the trough proved the water’s purity. I think I read that in one of his stories.
I never spent entire summers there, but my father made sure my brothers and I often visited his brothers and sisters who worked in the textile mills and lived in and around Rockingham, N.C., and Cheraw, S.C., and the Great Pee Dee River. In the 1970s that was like taking a few steps back in time.
Everything in that world revolved around food and hunting, or so it seemed to me. Or maybe that’s just what my uncles and cousins wanted me and my brothers — straight-up suburban teens — to taste. Feeding the dogs in the evening, getting up before sunrise for a huge breakfast that consisted almost entirely of food they had grown or raised or killed, my aunt never leaving the stove, a cigarette hanging from her mouth as she piled plates high and handed them to us. These folks still had a hog pen and chickens, pear and peach trees, a huge garden, and hundreds of jars of beans and pickled tomatoes and peach preserves lined shelves that wrapped around two sides of the cool basement.
After hunting we’d often stop by some country store, sit on the porch or around the trucks eating boiled peanuts or Vienna sausage and nabs, chugging Pepsi and Mountain Dews from bottles, telling stories about our hunt and reliving what had just taken place. My Uncle Skeet, the prankster and the patriarch, ribbing us about our bad shooting while he snuck some morsel to his favorite dog, Belle.
The technological world we live in today dehumanizes us and breaks connections to nature. As we celebrate this holiday that’s all about family, my mind sends me back to that time and those places. Here’s to hoping the old ways remain with me for all my days.
(Scott McLeod is the publisher and editor of The Smoky Mountain News. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
