The Last Appalachian Families Still Keeping These 19 Old Ways Alive (Mine Is One of Them)

🔗 93 things every Appalachian grandfather knew. How many are left in you? https://burlsizemore.com There is a woman up our creek who is ninety one years old, and she is the last person on it who still makes sorghum molasses. She has never once in her life looked at a thermometer. She lifts the wooden paddle out of the pan and watches the way the syrup comes off it, and she is right every single time. Last fall I asked her to teach me. Nobody else on that creek had ever asked her. So I went one whole year, January to November, around our creek and the next ones over, to the families who are the last ones still doing a thing the old way. Old Christmas on the sixth of January. The old tales told by the fire. A dulcimer tuned by ear until it sounds like it belongs to the creek. Lye soap. Planting by the signs. A bean seed kept in one family since before the Civil War. A chair with no nail and no glue in it. White oak baskets. The old shape note singing. Dry stone walls. Leather britches. A well found with a peach fork. A water mill. Apple butter stirred all night in a copper kettle. A fox race by a fire on the ridge. A broom made in a shed. In most of those houses there is one person left who can do it, and nobody under sixty learning. One of those nineteen families is mine. I will tell you which one, and what my grandfather wrote in the margin of our farm ledger in the spring I was eight years old. My grandfather could not carry a tune, but he could write, and down the margins of that ledger, right beside the price of corn, he wrote how a thing was done. A few years back I took what he wrote there, and what he taught me with his hands that never made it onto paper, and I put ninety three of those things into a manual, the way he would have told it at the kitchen table. Which of these nineteen is still alive in your family? And who is the one person left who knows how? Put their name in, first and last. https://burlsizemore.com