Courting an Appalachian Girl in 1974 Meant Passing Her Daddy's 20 Tests (I Failed the Last One)

🔗 93 things every Appalachian grandfather knew. How many are left in you? https://burlsizemore.com Son, do not sit there. That was the first thing her daddy ever said to me, on the front porch of his house in town, the second Sunday of April in nineteen seventy four. I was twenty years old and I had just reached for the wrong porch swing. He went inside and made one short pencil mark on the frame of his kitchen door. I did not know what that mark was. It took me two years to find out. There were twenty of them before he was done with me. The chair. The plate. The pew. A crawlspace in July. A fan belt on the hill below the water tower. A game of checkers. A telephone call at four in the morning. A pie supper that cost me every dollar I had in the world. I passed nineteen. The last one, the one that mattered most to him, I failed outright. And he let me marry his daughter anyway. Everything my grandfather taught me before I ever sat on that porch is in the book, ninety three of the old ways, with the reason each one works. If your wife's daddy put you through it, or if you were the daddy, tell me what he made you do. https://burlsizemore.com