Hi Janet!
What a terrible sounding night. Is your beloved "holler"-a real traditional rural holler? Or your own appellation for your neighborhood? It made me think of a place time forgot in Rockbridge County where I grew up and later worked as a social worker. Arnold's Valley. Caught between a couple of little Blue Ridge Mountains- a breathtaking drive. You rounded a curve into the valley and there were all these little ramshackle wooden houses--old cars--a few scrawny cows and chickens, woodpiles-in the winter you could smell all the woodsmoke hovering over the Valley. When they came into the office for their foodstamps, the whole place reeked of woodsmoke. Oh and dogs! Lots of really ugly, mangy dogs. Almost everyone up there had the same last name, and they all looked alike, either because they were inbred or because they all had the same empty expression on their faces-(well-I guess that could have been the result of the inbreeding). They didn't work, they did the minimum in education, they didn't farm, I don't know what they did, besides breed. However, the only calls we got on them were for child neglect, seldom physical abuse and they took care of their own, in some ways better than we do. The old people usually died there, rather than in nursing homes, with their family around them. they had a certain pride and occasionally even dignity. Other times, they were just nasty and stupid. I wondered how they lived before Welfare. Probably the same. I doubt it made much difference in their quality of life.
Whatever got me on that? Oh! Your holler! I just think a lot of people can't deal well anymore with modern life. It's just too complex and too overwhelming. They seem to be doing pretty much what the people in Arnold's Valley do--get by, breed, ask for whatever they can get, eke out a life with the basics, but the things that take us above bare existence--well-it's just too much for them. |
