Sherry Chandler

Charlie Whitt writes:

Renewed old acquaintance with fellow Phoenix Writer and KSPS member, Homer Bailey, of Portsmouth, OH. Homer was born in Magoffin county, KY. He tells me that he never considered the area we live in as Appalachia. Appalachia, he says, was more a way of life than just an area of country. He says that the area here along the Ohio River was like paradise compared to where he had come from. “There were jobs here”, he said. “Anyone starving here did so because he was just lazy.”

Homer also let me in on a few traditional, unwritten laws of Appalachia. For instance, when someone was sick, the family could shoot a squirrel in any season for the sick person to eat. Squirrel meat, he said, can be digested by anyone, ill or not.

If a person found and marked a bee tree no one else could cut the tree. Not even the property owner, if it happened to be on someone else’s property.

And, of course, the “coffin tree.” If someone sold his property, it
was common to except from the deed, a tree he had picked out to make his coffin from. Homer said his homeplace in the mountains had such a deed.

Have a happy fourth–chas w

Verlyn Klinkenborg, in today’s NYTimes, muses thusly:

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the volume the birds around us occupy. I don’t mean the vast migratory territories they mark out over the course of a year. I mean the spatial dimensions of their ordinary lives among us. This is a thought that has been working away in my head for a long time, ever since I saw a red-winged blackbird perched on a cattail and realized that the bird and the wetland in which the cattail was rooted were nearly synonymous.

“Habitat” sounds awfully general. It turns out to mean not some willful choice — the kind a human would make deciding to live in Dallas rather than in Denver — but a profound correlation. The marsh is who the red-winged blackbird is. The fence post is the meadowlark.

When I first began to notice birds, I thought of them as autonomous creatures whose habitations were simply unconnected matters of fact — as though the pictures of the birds in my bird book could somehow fly free of the pages themselves. But recognizing what you see means, first of all, taking account of where you see it. It becomes clear, sooner or later, that we live in a world of infinitely overlapping and abutting habitats — and that we are one of the rare creatures that are unbound, except in the broadest sense, by place and vocation. It takes an act of will on our part to remember how profoundly, and how beautifully, bound to habitat all the other creatures around us really are.

On Friday evening, my son and I strolled down the farm lane, chatting, and I was sipping my glass of Australian merlot. Suddenly from the alfalfa on our right, three young turkeys flushed up, followed in an eye blink by an adult bird I took to be their mother. And then, as we were marvelling that the adult turkey soared up and over the mature wild cherries in our little woods and, I assume, into the next predator-free hay field, a fourth youngster took off. We had been oblivious to them in the high alfalfa but they were taking no chances. Who knew a full-grown turkey could fly so high?

from the Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin-to-Die Rag

Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,
Send ‘em off before it’s too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

And it’s one, two, three
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

— Country Joe & the Fish

Joanie’s comment reminds me that I should remind you of the flag exhibit, History Unfurled, at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History. Although Joanie has gone off up north to The Museum of America and the Sea at Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, she was at the History Center to put this exhibit together. A consideration of the flag in all its glory and shame might be a good-enough way to spend a hot Fourth of July. The Center is air conditioned ;).