Persisting
in Appalachia: Opposition and Opportunities
Part ONE
Born in 1982 during an April snow, I was. My Daddy, a
self-made millionaire from World War II who made his shoes last longer through
the sensible use of duct tape was nearly 60 years old by then. He has lived in
a dilapidated trailer off the side of a county road known as “10” for some
years before my arrival. He would live there for many after. My mother, barely
out of her teens, persisted there with him, for a season, but not forever.
Five children came after me, the last born when Daddy was
eighty. The upbringing was sparse and full, all at once. As a sister, I found
some way to be mother, even though my nature isn’t motherly at all. I found a
way to be a friend, even though I always wanted center stage. I ended up a
tyrant, and that part I’ve tried to correct all this time later. The unique
life we led through and with the unusual people who raised us was something we
embraced and enjoyed and spurned.
But this is a story at odds from the start,
isn’t it?
My father was a man married 6 times with children far older
than my mother. He was a man of the Great Depression with a head of untamed
white hair kept too long (though we would dare say that to him), large glasses
and decided views on the use of salt and jokes. He frowned on my wants and big
personality, and still he was all but God come to Earth in my view. My mother
was a woman you cannot un-see once you’ve laid eyes on her, and she stayed up
all night watching me perform plays and allowed me to push my way onto trips
she took to anywhere, just because I said so, but somehow that didn’t construct
the obsession my father did within me for a person. She was taller and blonder
than average, eyes bluer than everyone else’s, bones and spaces all elegant and
symmetrical and perfection. She had dreams too big to ever come true in my
mind, and she had a husband telling her, at least once a day, “Eyes not
satisfied with seeing, ears not satisfied with hearing.”
I believed him first. He
was not one for dreaming, you see. I didn't want to be, either.
To be heard, to be seen between these two enormous
personalities was never easy. I tried. Somehow, I did it. A Kentucky Colonel,
hard-shell Baptist, former underground miner, a man with thousands of small
bill booklets left unpaid in his store because local people were in poverty, as
he would see no one go hungry. How oddly paired, he was, to a small town beauty
queen with a love of making spaces baroque and odd, always on a quest to spread
Jesus and a life story across a nation. They both blazed trails and carved out
lives of interest and value in directions that bore no similarities to one
another . . .some could say in spite of, though I wonder if not because of
lives in a rather isolated area of Appalachia.
Comments
Post a Comment