The Forgotten Memories of 1950s Appalachian Life (I Was There for Every One)

🔗 93 things every Appalachian grandfather knew. How many are left in you? https://burlsizemore.com The summer I was six, the electric co-op strung the last wire up our holler. That night every house on our creek lit up. Every house but one. The latch string on a door that never locked. Saturday in the county seat, and peanuts poured into a glass bottle of pop. The picture show for a dime. The whole holler leaning in to one battery radio on Opry night, and the first television on the creek. Barefoot from the first of May to the frost. Lightning bugs in a fruit jar and every mother with her own call down the holler. The polio summers and the sugar cube. One tub of bath water for the whole family. Decoration Day, dinner on the grounds among the graves. Hog killing day, the wish book, hand me downs, and courting on the porch until the lamp came to the window. Christmas with one orange in a sock. And my uncle, who got on a bus to Ohio and mailed home five dollars every two weeks for eleven years. I am not going to tell you it was all better, because it was not. But I will tell you what we had. We had each other, close enough to hear when somebody called. And we had time. My grandfather kept a farm ledger, and in the margins he wrote down how things were done. I sat down with that ledger and wrote out ninety three of the old ways from it. So tell me down below. Which one of these did you live through yourself? https://burlsizemore.com