Sherry Chandler » Appalachia Is a Way of Life
Appalachia Is a Way of Life
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
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