Life Lessons From the Oldest Appalachians I Ever Knew (I Wish I Had Listened Sooner)

🔗 93 things every Appalachian grandfather knew. How many are left in you? https://burlsizemore.com When I was nine years old, the oldest man on our creek put a little tobacco tin in my hand with the lid soldered shut. He told me not to open it until I was fifty years old or in real trouble, whichever one came first. I got to the trouble a good while before I got to fifty. I grew up at the head of a holler in eastern Kentucky, and nearly every grown person I knew had something to teach me. A midwife who sat my father down at the kitchen table. A mule trader. A schoolteacher who put a book on my desk and told me to read something every day. A woman who carried the mail on a mule. A storekeeper who kept a ledger behind the counter. A quilter who hid the ugly pieces in the middle. A sawmill man with eight fingers. A blind fiddler. A barber who hardly ever said a word. A beekeeper with the bees crawling on her bare arms. A bus driver whose bus waited for the slow one. And the oldest woman on the creek, on her knees, planting walnut trees she would never live to see grow. Not one of them ever wrote down a single line of what they knew. They just said it to you, one time, usually while their hands were busy with something else. There are six things those old people told me that I did not listen to until it was too late to do me any good. I will tell you which six, and what was inside that tin. So a few years ago I did the thing none of them ever did. I wrote out everything my grandfather knew how to do with his own two hands, ninety three of those things, the way an old man tells it across a kitchen table, so that whoever comes along after me does not have to learn it all the hard way. What is the one thing an old person in your family told you, one time, that you are still carrying? Put their name in, first and last. https://burlsizemore.com