Appalachia

It’s a big fat cheat to use another creative’s words. But when they are better than your own, when they say all the things you are too afraid to say at the moment, you let them carry you. Thank you, Joan Shelley and Carter Sickels — Carter, without you I would never have found this song.

***

A spring remembered, the taste of gin

An island light upon our skin

Your form it lingers, I trace just where you’ve been

The songs we sang I’ll sing again

When it breaks down

Oh, babe, let’s try

To see the beauty in all the fading

I saw the river thick with mud

Break through the banks and run

And I confess I liked it, I cheered the flood

When the waters hit the walls and won

When it breaks down

Oh, babe, let’s try

To see the beauty in all the fading

The roads are endless, they seem to grow

Vines that wind around the world

And though I hate it to leave my home

I love that car when I need to go

When it breaks down

Oh, babe, let’s try

To see the beauty in all the fading

And old Kentucky stays in my mind

It’s sweet to be five years behind

That’s where I’ll be when the seas rise

Holding my dear friends and drinking wine

When it breaks down

Oh, babe, let’s try

To see the beauty in all the fading

When it breaks down

When the stakes get high

To see the beauty in all the fading

Joan Shelley, The Fading

The link to Silas House’s op ed should function as a “gift article” and not be subject to a paywall. — EDG

I had to study awhile to figure out why Mae Amburgey seemed so familiar to me. I realized it was because I had seen that same look on my mother’s face when we escaped the flood all those years ago. Hers is the face of so many who have come before her and who will come after, of all people who have had to fight to survive. I’m haunted by the weariness and determination in the eyes of Chloe Adams. Hers are the eyes of so many children from all over the world who are powerless against others’ greed.

They are my people not only because they are Appalachian, like me, but because they are human beings. They are familiar faces because they are all of us, caught in the clutches of entities that have more rights than we do as individuals, including companies that so often get favors from politicians like McConnell and Paul, neither of whom have even shown up in the devastated place they are meant to represent. (McConnell said he planned to visit the region, and Paul said at a Louisville news conference that he would “try and get out there as soon as we can.”) They are ourselves and our children and our grandchildren in the near future; the climate crisis is happening now.

Silas House, The Washington Post, August 5, 2022

Esse Diem

Read. Think. Speak. Write.

Your Form It Lingers

Appalachians Know “The Look” of The Flooding