Musical Insomniac @anhundley - Tumblr Blog

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Hard

Hardburly. The name tells how life was here.

I was jerked up, hard, in a deep holler

where smoke from the smoldering gob pile hung in air

that smelled like carbide and warm dishwater.

Hardburly bullies roamed the camp.

Their fists broke my teeth before I worked

clanking shifts of hard coal seams and slabs,

bolting the dripping roof of gray jack rock.

Hard was that roof rock falling when the mine blew,

hard the dying, smothering in the dark.

“This is a real hard thing to have to do,”

the commissioner said, and read our names off a card.

Hard even the Hardburly burial.

They brought us out of darkness into night,

then to the cemetery on this rocky knoll.

They had to dig our graves with dynamite.

Jim Wayne Miller

jordantarwater-deactivated20171

The Brier Losing Touch with His Traditions

by: Jim Wayne Miller

Once he was a chairmaker.  People up north discovered him. They said he was “an authentic mountain craftsman.” People came and made pictures of him working, wrote him up in the newspapers.  He got famous.  Got a lot of orders for his chairs. When he moved up to Cincinnati  so he could be closer to his market (besides, a lot of his people lived there now) he found out he was a Brier. And when his customers found out he was using an electric lathe and power drill just to keep up with all the orders, they said he was losing touch with his traditions. His orders fell off something awful. He figured it had been a bad mistake to let the magazine people take those pictures of him with his power tools, clean-shaven. Wearing a flowered sport shirt and drip-dry pants. So he moved back down to east Kentucky. Had himself a brochure printed up with a picture of him using his hand lathe, bearded, barefoot, in faded overalls. Then when folks would come from the magazines, he’d get rid of them before suppertime so he could put on his shoes, his flowered sport shirt and double-knit pants, and open a can of beer and watch the six-thirty news on tv out of New York and Washington. He had to have some time to be himself.

thecommonchick

Can we skip to the part where I’m wearing my husbands tshirt flipping pancakes in a pretty house with a good job and two big dogs

lipgallaghersaysfuckyou

appalachian-appreciation-deacti

No number of age-old stereotypes can erase the fact that, Appalachia, distinctive as it is, has never been a region that is lily white. History reveals that Appalachia has always had a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been significant and influential. Migration and mobility has shifted patterns of diversity within sub-regions and particular counties, but many areas recall traditions of inclusive collaboration unlikely to have taken hold outside the mountains. Indeed, while some areas today are largely white, the collective memory of a county may reveal a vastly different history.

Dr. Althea Webb, Berea College (via appalachian-appreciation)

evilrashida

A man being sensitive and emotional doesn’t automatically make him a good person

starllex

when you see a dog from across the street

hara-kiri

mood

whisperingwordsofwisdom

When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty. The world teaches you that the way you exist in it is disgusting — you watch boys cringe backward in your dorm room when you talk about your period, blue water pretending to be blood in a maxi pad commercial. It is little things, and it is constant. In a food court in a mall, after you go to the gynecologist for the first time, you and your friend talk about how much it hurts, and over her shoulder you watch two boys your age turn to look at you and wrinkle their noses: the reality of your life is impolite to talk about. The world says that you don’t have a right to the space you occupy, any place with men in it is not yours, you and your body exist only as far as what men want to do with it. At fifteen, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. At almost thirty, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met still somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. They are children. They are children.

Stevie Nicks (via leakyflask)