Come In and Sit ASpell

The thing I miss most about Kentucky is the language.  Oh, I can still speak it.  The moment I hear someone speaking it (even if it is in my own head), it all comes back to me and the words flow out of me in true Kentucky drawl.  My kids think it is funny.  They think I'm making it up.  They don't understand how that  kind of talking can just be inside of me.  Researchers think that the Appalachian Mountain talk is disappearing.  They say that with better education and the influence of  television and radio Mountain talk will disappear all together.

I always tell people I'm bi-lingual.  I was raised by a Californian mother, who spoke proper English and by a Kentucky Hillbilly father who spoke, well... Mountain English.  I can speak both.  My husband couldn't even understand my dad when he first met him. "What he say?", he'd keep asking...

My grandma Witt raised my dad in Clover Bottom, Jackson county.  She used words like "Day Law" when you'd tell her about gettin' straight A's, or when she realized how much you'd grown in a week.  And words like "a'fixin'" and "fla'r" and "quar" "chillan" "dreckly" and of course, "come in and rest aspel".  My dad used words like rat, y'all, holler and "givin' me the deadset".

I delivered the Richmond Daily Register in Richmond, Kentucky from the time I was 10 until I was 16.  I had two different routes during that time period, the first about 2 miles through Norwood to BellevueTerrace (the projects) and back to Main Street.  That route including the poorest of poor and the wealthy widows.  Mrs. Burnam was my favorite.  Her mansion was huge and red and reminded me of a castle.  Her yard was gated with a circle driveway.  She would always have lemonaid for me on collection day.  Inside her home, the ceilings were high and she had an seat lift on the staircase because she was too old to walk up the stairs.  She had a gardner and a servant, but other than that, I never knew if she had any other family.  Her yard was beautiful.  Why did I never know anymore about her?  Sometimes my dad would load up a wagon of vegetables from his garden for me to drag along behind me to give to the people who lived in the projects.  They'd come out of their homes to take a bag of tomatoes or 4 to 6 ears of corn or some cucumbers. (Did I mention how well a garden grows in Kentucky?) They'd speak the language and we were all the same despite our upbringing or our homes or our circumstances.  I wish I knew more about them now.

The other was Willis Manor.  Willis Manor was a 5 story home for old folks.  I would ride the elevator to the top floor and race down the hallways, dropping papers in front of nearly every door, flying down the stairs to the next floor.  Fifteen minutes, tops.  But my fondest memories of that route are the people, whose names are long since forgotten, but were the old people of the Kentucky Hills. 

One day, I knocked on a new customers door.  She about fainted dead away when she saw me.  I had never seen her before, but she look at me as if she'd seen a ghost.  She invited me in and started asking about me.  Who was my daddy?  Who was his daddy and so on...  Turns out, she used to babysit for my great grandmother Fannie Minter Collier around McKee, Jackson County, Kentucky.  And, aparently, I looked just like my great grandmother.

It seems as if I have digressed.  But I can't help but think of these amazing mountain people and aristrocrats of Kentucky when I think of the language.  The way we referred to "catty corners" and "backer" and "carn", "aigs" and "malk" and "I was aimin' to" and "what fer?".  That's what I miss.  Hearing the talk, soaking it in, living it, breathing it.  Something to be proud of, even if the rest of the country found it backwards... It was who we were and slowly began to define who we would become.