Smoky Mountain Surprise: Chapter Three

Three

            My marriage completed the end of the last millennium.  Even though I knew I wouldn’t, couldn’t… grow coupled with him, I didn’t know life without him.  Thirty years together is a long time, especially when you meet at nineteen.  More than anything, I hoped for a loving parting.  But it wasn’t what happened. 

            “Puppy dogs, that’s what we were.”

            Over time I longed for that deep, spiritual connection.  Someone who had lots of time for their relationship.  Someone who wanted a heart like mine.  But he was self-involved and not interested in people.  I knew, despite years of tears…it was time to go.

            A friend once wrote,

            “Watching her from a distance this was a high functioning woman.  She got things done.  She took care of her family.  But you had to wonder how her heart that had been breaking for years was coping now. She didn’t even know.  Not back then.”

            But write is what I knew.  One book. Then two.  I didn’t know it then; I was writing myself home. 

           

I had just arrived in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina when I realized there was a reason for relocating there.  The flora and fauna were more than I ever imagined.  But it was the southern Appalachian culture along with its simplicity of word that opens the senses revealing a biosphere beyond anything imaginable. But more than that, a connection to one’s own senses. One’s self.

At once, I was puzzled local writers only wrote about the culture in the era.  I was more than glad to have a university close by.  I hoped it would help to balance local groupthink.

            Frustrated, angry I had to do something with this energy.  Writing a letter to the editor in a local newspapers helped me breathe.

“English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871 wrote,” Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds.”

Appalachian culture is ongoing. It is not a period frozen in time.  Heritage is ever changing like the people who comprise it.  And there are many interpretations of Appalachia. Aren’t we, after all, the experts in our own Appalachian experience? Who is to say who is acculturated or not?

No where have I ever lived where just about everyone asks, “Are you from here?” as if a Jackson County birth is a guarantee of entitlement or a means to divide people or maybe a starting point for a wonderful long term friendship. It doesn’t matter how or when we arrived, it does matter that we include one another.”  

              I was like the culture in which I lived.  Ever changing and definitely not fixed in 

time.   It is hard to know at precisely what time I found my voice.  In a different way.

            “That’s not who we are!  We’ve changed, evolved.  Just because we weren’t born here doesn’t mean this isn’t home.  You don’t own this land, no one does.  We’re really just passing through,” I said to a progressive southern writer.

            It was the little and not so little things that called this place home.  Creating a safe place, a preserve, hidden from all, where animals would know they were safe.  Before long, there were kits birthing on the land.  The red wolf in the garden.  But it was burning inside me, perhaps for all the years I kept so much inside, I was about to explode. 

            “Wanting, yearning for a spiritual connection.  Ultimately, it was in the letting go that you fell upward,” said a photojournalist friend.