Tennessee - Tumblr Posts - Page 2

Just passed by a couple Tennessee state troopers in downtown Nashville, and my immediate reaction was to confuse them for park rangers

Forest Path, Smokey Mountains, Tennessee

We found all the nuts and berries we need to make salsa 🌰🍓🫐🍅🌶️

Tree Tunnel, Cades Cove Loop Road, Tennessee

Lover’s Leap Falls, Rock City, Tennessee

saw people posting love letters to appalachia on @intheholler and all of them made me cry!considering that i’m leaving my hometown for college in about two weeks, i decided to write my own! also def go check out @intheholler ‘s blog, it’s awesome!!

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brought up in the rolling hills of greater appalachia, there were scarce times, there were good times, and there were rough times. just like anywhere else. but at all times there was hope and community, no matter the circumstance.

as many negative things as i hear about the place i live and as many experiences i have had that align with such criticisms, there were a thousand more instances where i was blessed with an enchanting, community enriched childhood. i will never forget or under-appreciate the closeness of neighbors despite our long lengths from one another.

what i mean to say is, appalachia, they could never make me hate you.

my Daddy is a pastor and my Mama the most down to earth pastor’s wife to walk this sweet, dark-soiled land we are so blessed to live on. even though my father and i don’t always get along, my mother and i are and will forever be the most kindred of spirits. through her wit, her will, and her wisdom, many traditions of appalachia have been passed down to me.

your porch ceiling best be haint blue, and you had better never close another person’s pocket knife. always gift a hand-quilted or crocheted blanket at every baby shower you ever attend. sprinkling salt at every doorway while squeaking out a hushed and hastened prayer for protection.

even those are just a few traditions that i can credit to my culture and my mother who instilled it in me. and that installation is so incredibly important. so as not to lose our rich, beautiful, and complex history.

the first rumblings, the soft spot

an important experience that i would argue helps many appalachian children to realize their culture and heritage is when they, for the first time, listen in to the kitchen talk among cousins. how Papaw can’t read so well because he never got to finish up school and why Uncle Rick got this new job manufacturing cars. how Meemaw lost her baby to scarlett fever and how Miss Deretta down the road worked at the children’s home where your cousin Thomas got dropped off in a cardboard box after a flood that demolished the apartments uptown. slowly, piece by piece, your young mind starts to understand the ebb and flow of unspoken community support. the gentle hand holding taking place through the entire mountain range. the interwoven families that aren’t any kin.

running interference

as you grow up, unfortunately, the world seeps in, slow and clever as a fox in the hen house. making your own out to be some sort of gnawing hillbilly that don’t know their ass from grass. and suddenly when someone asks where you’re from you’re ashamed to admit it. the only thing that you and friends talk about is getting out and seeing new places, away from the parents and the gossip pew of your respective churches. on friday night you all meet up in the Dollar General parking lot and carpool to your school’s football game so that you can shout wildly inappropriate cheers at the rival of the night from the student section. you run into Mrs Connor while washing your hands in the restrooms behind the stadium and when she tells you vibrant stories of your Pa in high school, skipping for deer hunting season along with half of the class of ‘68, you appreciate her. and you don’t know it, but every interaction like that, grows your mountain heart bigger, making more room for story after story.

one of my friends is now engaged to the man who was their starting quarterback. the two of them are the sweetest of couples. the world is perfectly small here.

weeks-long revival and a singing every night

after an innocent turned passionate kiss in your church crush’s car, you find space on the pew with the rest of your youth group, leaving room for jesus, of course. Aneoumes (an-nay-mus, unique name, i know) the church Dulcimer player brings out his fine jnstrument with Mrs Dorothy, the pianist and the previously mentioned Mrs Connor on the organ to do their own mesmerizing renditions of When the Roll is Called up Yonder, I’ll Fly Away, The Gloryland Way, Mansion Over the Hilltop, He Set me Free, Heaven’s Jubilee, and the baptist favorite, Amazing Grace making for a beautiful night of harmony among voices. anymore you weren’t sure what you believed (not that you dared to tell a soul, or even say it out loud) but you knew good and well that church brought people together and helped those in need, and both of those were things you could get on board with. of course the politics were messy, but you could mostly keep your lips sealed. your home church certainly did more to feed the hungry than the government officials who were supposedly all libbed up, or at least that is what they’d pushed.

suddenly, this place didn’t seem so bad. you were worn smack out but only because of the late company, which you certainly didn’t mind in exchange for a typical night of hot, early sleep. when you got home Todd Lee your neighbor was still cutting hay and so the putputput of his tractor lulled you off to sleep. he told you “it keeps the sugar in, seeing’s that it’s nice and cool out in the dark” he had told you when you let him know that his lively tractor sounds put you at peace every night.

something about this place felt more special, fonder, than what you had understood in your younger teen years.

the first leaving

your dad received a stimulus check during the pandemic and decided to go visit his aunt Barbara on the northeast coast. being away from home a whole week felt like a pig being gutted and packed, still warm in the patties. it was awful. every night you cried, holding your younger siblings who did the same, no one here smiled or talked to you and the rain didn’t smell right, the food was bland and blended all together in taste, worst of all there was nowhere to be that wasn’t covered in concrete and where there was, you had to pay for access. when the mountains finally came back into sight, your heart leaped and tears fell from your eyes. that moment was as close to divine intervention as you’d felt since your baptism. gratitude overwhelmed your senses and you thanked jesus for being born where you were. where people were friendly and food was good and friends were close and everything was wide open.

for a moment you wondered if when David wrote “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.” if he too was experiencing the peace of returning home after a tumultuous time away.

the second leaving and the excited return

now, you’re headed off to college. it grips at your heart that you won’t be with the supportive community around you that you’ve always had. but this time the leaving makes sense. you’ll educate yourself on how to teach and help others, you’ll take extra, unnecessary classes on heritage and both cultural and natural history. upon your return you get to take all that hurt from being away and pour back into the place that has loved you so well. and you get to be the next generation to tell your own kiddos to keep the haints from their houses and their hands to the knives in their own pockets.

hopefully your loving will look a bit different, cast a wider net so that those kids who weren’t as lucky as you feel accepted in the community of people around them.

most importantly when you return with your degree and your license to teach, you can instill pride in those children, let them know that these lush hills and woods and creeks and mountains they call home really are some of the most wonderful places this world has to offer up. encourage them to believe that professional speaking is not removed from their dialect but rather in their clarity of conveyance. uplift the idea that time spent with family and friends, neighbors and strangers alike is to be valued. and most importantly in my book, teach them to appreciate the stories they are told, to remember them whether mentally or by doing some manual record keeping. our stories are our testaments to the fulfilling life that can be lived here. and the stories of our neighbor may have a great impact in our thinking.

what i’m trying to say is, appalachia, they could never make me hate you.

~ with much love,

addybug

Tree Tunnel, Cades Cove Loop Road, Tennessee

posting here because this just doesn’t feel right to talk about in the horseimagebarn voice but this is extremely important to talk about.

my partner and i have returned to our hometown to stay with her family and my own has gotten a hotel here too (they moved to the town we currently live in after we did) so we are all safe and out of the thick of it

however there are tens of thousands of people who are not both in my own town and in the many surrounding it. appalachia will take an extremely long time to recover from this and there are more storms on the way. all i see on social media right now is people asking for shelter because their homes have been destroyed, or people asking for help searching for family members who are missing. hundreds of trees have fallen. hundreds of homes have flooded. roads are literally falling apart. preexisting sinkholes due to shitty pipes are opening up and consuming land. dams are on the verge of bursting and the only way to stop it is to release water so quickly it floods whole towns. all but one of our cell towers are down, so only people with at&t have service and the rest can’t contact anyone. over half the town still doesn’t have power. a major water supply issue occurred and the entire town is on a water boil order with no electricity to boil with. people are trapped in their homes and workplaces or out on the street because they have nowhere to go. law enforcement is blocking off roads but trapping people in the process. people have to be rescued by helicopter. our animal shelter has no water or power and boarding facilities have been flooded. entire villages like chimney rock nc are gone, and entire cities like asheville are cut off from the rest of the state and are completely inaccessible. ALL OF THE ROADS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA ARE CLOSED. 400+ roads are closed because they are unsafe . that is INSANE!!!

when people say that climate change isn’t real, they don’t know what they’re talking about. climate change and its father capitalism are only going to continue to worsen lives in every way possible. i live in the mountains and our infrastructure is completely unprepared to handle hurricanes and it’s only going to get worse. it’s such a strange and eye-opening experience to live something like this when you think that it could never happen to you because that type of weather shouldn’t reach you in your environment. climate change doesn’t care where you live. it’s real.

western north carolina and the rest of the southeast that has been hit by helene need help. more people need to be talking about this so that the government DOES SOMETHING because the government historically fucking hates appalachia and it still does!!! the major state institution near me took DAYS to respond despite being the only place in town with power and wifi connection because they had to wait for the state to approve their response—they could have allowed thousands of people to evacuate days prior to the hurricane hitting us but they didn’t do anything before or after until it was too late!!! it’s bullshit!!! PLEASE get talking about this because something has to be done. climate change is going to continue happening and our mountains and the people in them are going to suffer immensely. hundreds if not thousands are now homeless. please talk about this look at the footage online of the wreckage and look how quickly our infrastructure crumbled. we need better. the people of appalachia deserve better.

i’ll get back to posting horses soon. but for now this is a lot. my friends are homeless and my family had to get off the mountain or be trapped there without power and water for days. we’re all safe but exhausted. i hope everyone who has been affected by this is staying safe. if you are in western nc, dm me. when i come back, if you’re in my area, im happy to bring supplies. stay safe everyone