silashouse.net/blog

Silas House's blog can now be found at www.silashouse.net/blog .  It will be updated regularly.  Thanks for visiting.  

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The Matter Is You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

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There are two places in Southeastern Kentucky I think of as my true homes:   the small community of Lily , in the foothills of Laurel County, and, fifty miles east, Rockhouse Creek , in the lush mountains of Leslie County.   I will focus on Rockhouse here, mainly because it is the dark, lovely topography of my collective memory, but also because it is the epitome of Central Appalachia, the kind of place that journalists-who-don’t-know-what-they’re-talking-about always zoom in on with their statistics and opinions. In fact, Rockhouse is located just a few miles from the communities that were recently the focus of a piece called “ What’s The Matter With Eastern Kentucky? ” by Annie Lowrey in The New York Times that referred to Appalachia and the Deep South as “the smudge of the country.”             Well, I am that smudge.   My people are that smudge.   My homeland is that smudge. And we are much, mu...
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Heirloom

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First in a series of short essays based on photographs. This is my Great Uncle Dave's camping chair. He carried it to Dale Hollow Lake for almost fifty years, from when he first visited there in the late 1940s until shortly before his death in 1996. These types of chairs are still common at some funeral homes in the South but when I was growing up the elders in my family always took the lightweight and sturdy folding seats on camping trips, too. It is still solid as a pine knot and surprisingly comfortable. It folds up smoothly and hooks right across my shoulder for easy carrying. My Great Aunt Mildred gave this chair to me a few years after Uncle Dave passed away.  She's gone now, too, like all of the real elders in my family.   My family only recently rose to solid middle class so we do not inherit expensive antique sideboards or wedding China patterns and silver. Our heirlooms are the smaller things: the dripolator (a stovetop coffee pot) my aunt used every day of her life,...
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The Complications of Freedom-A short excerpt

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Huge showers of red and yellow and green and blue and white exploded on the sky, blossoming like giant willow trees. The booms were huge and square-sounding, echoing several times down the hills lining the river. Between explosions, blue smoke hung on the sky. After a while, a sort of reverent silence fell upon us. All the children stopped running about and screaming, and everyone became still. Perhaps we were all understanding that we had been free for two hundred years, or as free as people can possibly be. I like to think that everyone was filled with a brief melancholy, a moment in which we took into account everything we had, and appreciated it all, and felt blessed and lucky to have been born in this country, in this time and space. Or maybe everyone was taking into account all of the wrongs done to others to gain this freedom, the freedom that had been taken from others for our gain. My sister Josie...looked up at to the sky. Then she whispered to me: ...
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