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From: <>
Subject: [KYCLAY-L] Re: maybe just childhood?
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 13:00:29 -0400

Betty,
No, it certainly wasn't just childhood for me. I went to college in KY and lived there from
1968 till 1984. I was 31 when I last left the hills of Kentucky and I still smell the sweet
morning air. Those mountains are magic. I often ask myself, in the midst of geneology...why
did John Holland, Levi Bowling, Felix Gilbert, or James Carpenter, Tom Arnett or even Jabel
Smith stop there? Why didn't they go a little further to the Bluegrass where the meadows and
flatlands stretched as far as the eye cold see?

I suspect some of my ancestors were hiding following the Cherokee "Trail of Tears" in
1838-39. However, this isn't all.

There is magic there. You cannot sleep in an old cabin by a creek deep in a holler without
some of it seeping into your bones. And it is not just being in the country. I can get into
the country within 5 miles of my home. It is the whiporwill, the locust buzzing in the
trees, the mist rising from the mountain that lures me back to the Red Bird River and up
Arnett's Branch. It is the memory of those I loved and the ties to the homeplace, but it is
also a deep desire for that simple way of life, the "howdy" from the porch of a neighbor.

They say that Appalachia is poor. I know better. It is the richest place of all.

Steve Hollen

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