digging for apples january 18th, 2001 I'm feeling funky, so this is my attempt to cheer myself up. I'm making some Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Tea, and I'm curling up in front of the warm glow of the computer screen, jabbing at the little dark characters on the keys of my keyboard, ignoring the strange noises that always surround my house at night. I'm also hungry, but I'm trying to ignore that, too. I've eaten five times today already. Pancakes with peanut butter, a sausage biscuit, hash, some weird conglamoration of broccoli and spinach and aspargus, pound cake with cream cheese, and a cereal fruit bar. I even took my vitamins today. I spent a long time driving in the rain tonight. The Environmental News show that I've been working with for the past couple of months meets every Wednesday night. Production meetings and tapings are done alternate Wednesday nights. I went to my first production meeting tonight - or, should I say, *tried* to go to my first production meeting tonight. Instead of asking for an exact time and location, I simply assumed they would occur at the same time and location as the taping - and, of course, ended up standing in the lobby of WETS for about 45 minutes. (That's not entirely true. I took the liberty of cleaning out my car while I waited for something to happen. I can't handle sitting around doing nothing.) Figuring out that I had made one of my all too frequent mistakes, I got back in my little white Nissan Sentra named Astrid, and drove back home, through the rain, and the dark. Which didn't bother me too much. I like the rain, and I like the dark. I'm a horrible channel-hopper when it comes to car stereos. I have twelve separate channels programmed into my FM alone, not to mention the random channels I've found for AM. Which isn't really all that impressive until you remember that I live in Mosheim, out in the middle of nowhere, and we don't *have* good radio stations out here. Then it slowly dons on you that Devon has programmed every single station that *might* play something even *vaguely* interesting, once in a blue moon. And so, I travel down 11-E, and I switch through my pre-programmed channels, and the soft-rock station that every single dentist office in Greeneville plays in their waiting room is doing one of those request-and-dedication shows, and there's this woman calling in, talking about the fact she's taken an out-of-state job, and has moved a few thousand miles away from her teenage daughters (and their father, I think - I came in on the tail-end of the conversation) and so she wants to play a song for them - any song to tell them how much she loves them and misses them. So the deejay decides to play "Forever Young" by Rod Stewart. I had never really listened to the song before. I had this sort of inner-programmed gag reaction to any Rod Stewart song that I happened to hear in passing, the exception being that song about the gay guy that I can't remember what it's called - "The Killing of Georgie" - and then "Broken Arrow" and "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?" for a brief period between my 8th grade and freshman year of high school, which was, of course, *nowhere* near related to certain romantic events that were occuring in my life at the time. Ahem. For whatever reason, I decided to give the song a chance this time, I decided to really *listen* to what it was saying. And, being the sap that I am, I just started crying. Little saltwater streams streaking both cheeks, while I turn up the windshield wipers because my visibility has lessened. That is, by far, the most beautiful song for a parent to sing to their child. And I don't even know if Rod Stewart has children, or what it was that inspired him to write it, but I was glad I finally listened. I drove home, I played with Ash for a little while. I dressed her in her pajamas, played 'tidy up the nursey' (which is pretty self-explanatory - she sits in her crib while I clean up her toys and sing stupid songs), brushed her teeth, read her Wynken, Blynken, and Nod by Eugene Field, held her in my arms and rocked her while I sang "Flying Dreams", "Beautiful Kittenfish", "Pretty Little Starfish", "Pretty Little Starfish" (again), "Beautiful Kittenfish", and "Flying Dreams", in that order. And then I put her to bed. It's our routine. It happens every night. And I'm proud of myself for it. My tea is done. And now I can't connect to the internet. My Tuesday night class is Appalachian Current Issues. I cannot even begin to express how much I love this class. It is so full of...stuff. Just all of this stuff that I never knew before about the very land that I've lived in for the majority of my life. Every single time I step into that class, I feel like my head is being stuffed full of pins and needles. I feel as if I have knowledge pouring out of my ears by the time I leave. But I've been thinking, of course. About Appalachia. About being Appalachian. Most people who live in this region deal with some form of denial at some point in their life. Appalachia has always been connected with poor white trash and, not wanting to be connected with such negative stereotypes, people often totally reject their roots, deny that part of their cultural upbringing. They want to go elsewhere, to do better. I know, because this was what *I* wanted to do for a very long time. I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but I moved out here when I was two years old. I’ve lived in various areas of Tennessee for short periods of my life, but my grandparents house right next door to me has been my concrete block, my cornerstone of stability, the place I’d always come back to for as long as I can remember. I spent summers in cut-off blue-jean shorts and t-shirts, fishing for catfish in the pond, gathering blackberries in big pickle barrels, shooting bows and arrows at everything. Angie and I would climb up in the barn, in the hayloft, with me always to scared to go out on the beams themselves. It's an old barn, left over from the McLean dairy farm that existed here in the early part of the century, the same Old Man McLean who built the covered Bible Bridge off of Warrensburg Road where Dustin proposed to me a long time ago, when I was in high school. Or at least the story goes. Angie and I would try to jump over mud puddles, and we'd never succeed. We had to sit on the back porch and hose our feet off, wash out our shoes, let them dry in the sun. So we'd take a few turns on the tire swing, and not think anything of it. My grandfather kept cows for a while when I was little, except I'd always make pets out of them. There was Momma Cow, and there was Goldie - who was my friend, and she'd always come up to the fence whenever I was there and let me pet her. Papaw had sat me on her back when she was still pretty little (and *I* was pretty little) and I suppose we always had an Understanding after that. We've had chickens on and off for all of my life (the farm is presently pro-chicken mode) and we had pigs for a while. We even had goats, at one point. My grandfather and I would sit out on the porch and call bob-whites, back when he still had his teeth and could whistle, back when there were still bob-whites around to whistle at. We'd watch mud-dawbers building their nests on the railings of the porch, and Papaw would tell me to notice that those mud-dawbers didn't stop working on Sunday, and you could tear those nests down dozens of times, they'd only build them back up again - and that said something for persistence. And Papaw would always leave the mud-dawbers alone, no matter how many yellow-jackets and wasp nests he tore down. And Papaw taught me how to read the wooly worms, and where to find pillbugs, and what bait was good for catfish, and he would make me slingshots. We hatched out baby chicks in the kitchen floor in a cardboard box, using my Nite-Brite as an incubator light. The house was covered in flowers and greens and trees, and our meals were at least 60% from our very back yard. And in spite of all this, I didn't consider myself Appalachian. It was something you never really thought about, of course, until you got older. And my teenage years inspired an entire rejection of my past. After all, I was a 'goth', and what 'goth' would be seen feeding chickens or using 'improper grammar'? Not to mention, I was bitter at being misunderstood and unaccepted by my peers. So I equated Appalachian with close-mindedness and went on my merry way. And, poor Eric. That was probably evidence of my worst rejection of my Appalachian hertiage right there. I dated this boy, Eric, for my sophomore year of high school, and he was just about as Appalachian as they come. He had the thick accent, he made the potato guns, the whole bit. And we'd have long arguements about the proper pronunciation of words. "It's washrag, Eric. Not warshrag." "Whatever! Yer the one who says dawg 'dag'." And at the same time, I was drinking moonshine, I was spening lots of time walking around in forests and taking pictures. And Eric would take me to his family's farm and we'd run around the barn and carve our names in the hayloft and chase eachother over barrels of hay, taking precautions not to make the bees angry. Eric in himself was testimony to the fact that intelligence and open-mindedness could go hand-in-hand with Appalachian culture. But I still had a hard time understanding it. I didn't realize I was Appalachian until I went off to college. It was a severe culture shock for me. Things are done completely different in the flatlands than in the mountains. Voices are different. Lifestyle is different. People have totally different ways of dealing with things. The world moves faster. Everyone has more information than you. The honor system of the flatlands is completely different than that of the highlands. In my little nest in the mountains, I had remained happily cut-off from the rest of the world, for the most part. Going to Middle Tennessee placed me in contact with an entire stream of life I simply wasn't accustomed to. And...it's flat. I mean, what's with that? And then I found myself having a conversation with David Dantes one day. And he called me a redneck. But not in a derrogatory way - as an outsider looking down upon a people beneath them - but in that comrade type of a way, that only another insider could ever get away with. He called me a redneck, and it felt good. So now I'm minoring in Appalachian Studies. Now I'm searching my geneology and connecting with family members I never even knew before. I have big dreams of collecting it all on videotape, and preserving it, before this way of life dies out completely. Because, in Greene County at least, it's dying, and it's dying fast. In my family alone there's no telling how many traditions were lost simply because no one along the line wanted to bother with passing them on - they simply didn't deem them important enough. My grandparents moved out West in order to make a living. And those of us afterwards have sprung from a rootless generation, with this heavy desire to dig back, just enough, and to find out what place it is we come from, and destroy this sense of belonging nowhere. Everybody's got to belong somewhere. Everyone's gotta have someone to love. Even if it's just themselves. You know, no one has ever asked me why my diaryland username is 'nuala'. Maybe that's just something you don't usually ask - along the same lines as it not being polite to ask a woman her age, I guess. Or maybe all of you out there in radioland are just clever enough to know where it comes from already. Yet, for anyone left in the dark and too embarrassed to admit it, I will explain. Nuala is the faerie servant in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic series. This is a picture of her, to the right, from the back cover of the 1999 Vertigo: Winter's Edge which is currently on loan to me from Dust. She is a servant to the Lord Shaper of the Dreaming, and spends the majority of the series nualawith this great, unrequited love for the King of Dreams. The episode in this book takes place after Dream's death, and Nuala decides that it's time to wake up now. That it's finally time to leave the Dreaming behind. And...I think she's right. I mean, on the one hand, Lucien will never be able to confess the fact that he's always loved her, but, on the other hand, she can stop brooding over a love that never existed and get on with the rest of her life. And I think that's a good thing. And speaking of Sandman, I was glancing at my bookshelf the other day and noticed, of all the Sandman graphic novels I've collected, I now only have The Kindly Ones and Preludes and Nocturnes remaining. Where are my other books? Whom did I lend them to? Please be sure to give them back, eventually, whoever you are. It's late. I have school tomorrow. The internet has been kicking me off all night. But I feel good. I feel unclenched. I can sleep now. G'night.