Allow me to tell you something

I discovered that things were different in our holler. Furthermore, our home was a holler, not a hollow like you could find on a fancy map or read about in a dictionary. According to Merriam-Webster, it is a tiny valley or basin. You may also learn from the definition that it refers to an empty space or a depressed or low portion of a surface. What it can't tell you, though, is what it implies, where the depression in the soil becomes apparent, or what is living in all that empty space.

Only those who grew up in hollers are capable of doing it.

In a holler, you most certainly grew up within spitting distance of a relative or, at the absolute least, near enough to see their home once the leaves had all fallen for the season. It's a spot where the sun rises a bit later in the morning and sets a little earlier behind the hills. When people aren't destroying the forests we explored as kids, unsupervised and unafraid, or muddying the clear streams where we splashed and found fossils and learned how to pick up crawdads without getting pinched, they're always discovering the treasures buried in hollers — timber, mineral rights and gas rights. When they aren't ravaging our minds with OxyContin, inexpensive heroin, low-paying jobs, Mountain Dew, and failing schools, it is us who are doing the ravaging by pulling out our guns, throwing punches, getting beat up in front of the kids, or desperately searching through Dad's dresser while he's away, knowing there's something in there that will get us high.

When they aren't ravaging our minds with OxyContin, inexpensive heroin, low-paying jobs, Mountain Dew, and failing schools, it is us who are doing the ravaging by pulling out our guns, throwing punches, getting beat up in front of the kids, or desperately searching through Dad's dresser while he's away, knowing there's something in there that will get us high.

I could have brought you to the holler where I grew up before my dad's friend set fire to our home. We might have observed the Appalachian Eden spread out about us, a patchwork of colour and beauty and memory, from our old front porch. The white boards of Granny's home could be seen if we turned to the left, towards the entrance of the holler, particularly in the winter when the two pawpaw trees in her cow field lost their exotic leaves. The head of the holler lay up the road, but beyond the sycamore tree that towered over our yard's corner, nothing appeared to actually exist.

When it rained, I used to stand on the porch because the sound of the beating rain on the tin roof drowned out all other sounds. The whip-poor-will sung its repetition, which always appeared to be a love song, and the frog songs in the springtime told me that the earth was awakening. A few months later, an unsettling sense would linger between them as the cicadas would buzz and hum. Although I was puzzled by how those weird animals were able to awaken from their slumber and join the rest of us aboveground, I still enjoyed the sound of summer in our holler.

The majority of this acreage is part of the Daniel Boone National Forest, but Granny had 100 acres nestled away there that she had gifted to my parents. We had a tiny garden in front of the home that was big enough for bikes, play and at one point, piglets to rummage about in. The yard was enclosed by a page-wire fence, and immediately beyond it was a one-lane dirt road. I spent an indefinite amount of time exploring the area between Mill Branch Road and a hillside that appeared out of nowhere.

I learned that the blackberry brambles along the side of the road and the Indian paintbrush flowers—the brightest splash of red I've ever discovered in a forest dominated by the green of living leaves and the brown of the dead—appear in the same locations every year. Blackberries may occasionally be as sour as anything, but when you bit into a sweet one, its juice sprang onto your tongue and the skin gave way to your teeth, it was worth the risk. You might not have realised you had also consumed a sugar ant that was attempting to get its own full since those wild berries were so delicious. Each year, In our yard's shaded area, behind the old smokehouse, I searched for two patches of purple phlox: one on the slope across from where our wooden picnic table was located, and the other. I discovered the little flowers, which were born and rooted to this land as I am, blooming repeatedly in the same locations with such exquisite symmetry.