She Walked a Crooked Path

In my grandparents' house in Arkansas, we had a hodge podge of random dishes and plates. I guess, looking back, you could call the decor Depression-style, and I loved it. I had my favorites--the plate with the cracks under the glaze and tiny roses circling the outer rim, the spoon that had a similar floral etching and had probably been part of an elegant set when it was new, a highball/Collins glass with vertical irish green stripes. I would think about my grandfather's stories of our ancestors from the old country while I sat with my glass of milk, imagining that somehow they lived in those stripes on the glass. Kids... Sometimes if I'm a homewares store, I'll find myself absently scanning the glassware section for those irish green stripes, but I never find it. The remnants of my Arkansas childhood are all gone now. My grandparents, my childhood collections of rocks and sticks and bottles that my brother and I dug up in the back field, things I wrote from ...

I recently watched a documentary called Hillbilly , which was about a young filmmaker returning to her hometown in Kentucky to examine the roots of the stereotype, and how the people of Appalachia and the natural resources of the region have been exploited over a long period of time. It opened some thoughts for me, and I've tried twice to write this post because it's a rabbit hole I'm easily lost in. Throughout my childhood and most of my adulthood, I was deeply embarrassed to have grown up in Arkansas. There were, of course, the jokes about hillbillies--people who had no education, couldn't afford nice clothes or shoes or tell the sexual difference between a farm animal, a child, or a cousin, and were camouflaged by the dirt they were always covered in. I knew those jokes from a young age, and sometimes I told them.  When my parents divorced, my mom moved my brother and me to live with her parents in the home they had retired to in Arkansas. We went from living in a ni...