We're not Southern, we're Appalachian. We don't live on big farms. There's no big farms to be had. We have big mountains and skinny valleys and we perch our houses on one or in the other. We can't raise a lot of cattle, they don't thrive on the mountain sides. Us Appalachians and goats are about all that adapt well to these hills. We're strong. We adapt. We always have. If we can't work on these mountains, we'll just work under them. I don't know a lot of people that drink sweet tea around here. I know that equates with southern living. But we're not Southern, we're Appalachian.
We're not country, we're Appalachian. We don't have a lot of folks wearing cowboy hats. We're not cowboys. We wear mining hats or coal black dirty hair from a long day's work. Ball caps to replace the feel of a mining hat, or just to have something to hide under because we like to be tucked away, just like how these mountains wrap around us. Dirty hands, dirty faces, dirty clothes, but clean hearts. We may be out riding horses in old tennis shoes, dirty work boots, or heavy mining boots with toes made of steel, just like us. We're not rounding up cattle, we're blowing off steam. We get our heads right and our hearts close to God, spending the evening out brushing down an old horse. She's not a thoroughbred, she's therapy. We don't have a lot of fields to work. But we like to work the land we have. We get our hands dirty planting corn, beans, peas, potatoes, not enough to sustain an income, just enough to sustain our family. We like to prove we can do that. Sustain us. You know skin a buck, run a trot line, us Appalachian people really can survive. And we're not country, we're Appalachian.
We're not city folk, that's for sure, not even town folk. We're Appalachian. We're probably not current with the trends. Our men wear old work clothes for work, new work clothes to go into town. Depending on whether the coal black on their hands looks fresh or half-scrubbed away, we know which direction they're headed. But those dirty hands keep their babies in clean clothes. We may even head out to Lexington, Charleston, Johnson City, Asheville, land as foreign to our lives as countries across the oceans, to get some school clothes. And we will wear them to school, to play, and out in the gardens in the mud and dirt to help mommy and daddy hoe the corn. We don't have anything to prove. People outside of these mountains don't care about us. And people inside these mountains already know. Folks in the city would look at us with wide-eyed wonder, maybe amusement, maybe disgust. But we don't worry because we seldom need to go there, and they don't know how it would benefit their souls to come here. So our paths rarely cross. We're not city folk, we're Appalachian.
There's nothing wrong with southern folk, country folk, city folk. We see their worth, each group of them, and appreciate what they do. But we're not them. Some of us have been amongst them, and learned from them, and loved them. Traveling into their worlds on the working backs of the people in our world. Sent to learn, to broaden, to do better than the generation before us. Just like everywhere else, that's what we want for our children. But it is often that we learn that nothing is better than what we had. Hard work, big hearts, warm souls, level heads, wisdom, strength, perseverance, honesty, sincerity, love. They send us to know better, to do better. When we find out they knew better all along, we come home. We are our own. And to understand us is to love us. So just try to understand. We are Appalachian.
Source: Facebook/Greasy Creek Gal
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