True Appalachia hills people and places!

 Via Jerry Loposser via True Appalachia hills people and places!

 

“We Are Appalachia”: We're not Southern, we're Appalachian. We have big mountains, skinny valleys, and we perch our houses on one or in the other. We're strong. We adapt. We always have. If we can't work on these mountains, we'll just work under them. I know that equates with southern living. But we're not Southern, we're Appalachian.

 

We're not country, we're Appalachian. We don't have a lot of folks wearing cowboy hats. We're not cowboys. We may have dirty hands, dirty faces, dirty clothes, but clean hearts. We get our hands dirty planting corn, beans, peas, potatoes, not enough to sustain an income, just enough to sustain our family. We like to prove we can do that. Sustain us. You know skin a buck, run a trot line, us Appalachian people really can survive. And we're not country, we're Appalachian.

 

We're not city folk, that's for sure, not even town folk. We're Appalachian. We're probably not current with the trends. We may even head out to Asheville, Hickory or Morganton, land as foreign to our lives as countries across the oceans, to get some school clothes. And we will wear them to school, to play, and out in the gardens in the mud and dirt. We don't have anything to prove. Folks in the city would look at us with wide-eyed wonder, maybe amusement, maybe disgust. But we don't worry because we seldom need to go there, and they don't know how it would benefit their souls to come here. So our paths rarely cross. We're not city folk, we're Appalachian.

 

There's nothing wrong with southern folk, country folk, city folk. We see their worth, each group of them, and appreciate what they do. But we're not them. Some of us have been amongst them, and learned from them, and loved them. Traveling into their worlds on the working backs of the people in our world. Just like everywhere else, that's what we want for our children. But it is often that we learn that nothing is better than what we had. Hard work, big hearts, warm souls, level heads, wisdom, strength, perseverance, honesty, sincerity, and love. They send us to know better, to do better. We are our own. And to understand us is to love us. So just try to understand. We are Appalachian.

 

(Unknown. Pictured is the Hollifield Cabin in Armstrong in McDowell County)