A short glossary of Appalachian weather, work, and season.
Most of the words below describe things that only matter if you do them yourself. Weather that only matters if you grow something. Work that only matters if nobody does it for you. They are ordinary words, or they were.
We named a collection after them. Here is what they mean.
Holler
A narrow valley between two ridges. It is also everyone who lives in it, which is the more important meaning. You are not from a holler the way you are from a city. You are from it the way you are from a family.
Blackberry winter
A cold snap in May, arriving after the blackberry canes have flowered and well before there is any fruit on them. It is named for the blossoms, not the berries — a common confusion, and an understandable one.
It belongs to a whole family of little winters, each named for whatever happens to be in bloom when the cold comes back. Redbud winter comes first, in early April. Then dogwood winter, then locust winter, then blackberry winter, then whippoorwill winter, when the birds start calling at night. The last and least dignified is linsey-woolsey britches winter, named for the moment you finally put the heavy trousers away and immediately need them again.
The little winters are a calendar kept by plants instead of numbers. They are more accurate than they have any right to be.
Killing frost
The first freeze cold enough to kill tender plants outright. Not a light frost, which sets things back — a killing frost ends the garden in a single night. In the southern mountains it usually comes in October.
The morning after is unmistakable. Everything that was green the day before has gone black and slack. Nobody mourns it. By October you have been waiting since August.
Fodder shock
Cornstalks cut and stood together in the field to dry, leaned into a cone and tied near the top. Fodder is what you feed livestock through the winter; the shock is the bundle. A field of them looks like a village of small tents.
The practice is mostly gone now, replaced by silage and machinery. A field of shocks in October has a specific smell — dry stalk, dust, and a sweetness somewhere between hay and cured tobacco.
Wash day
Traditionally Monday. Before plumbing, this meant hauling water, heating it in a kettle over a fire in the yard, lye soap, a washboard, and a full day of it. Everything went on the line afterward.
The smell of clothes dried outdoors in cold air is not really the smell of soap. It is the smell of sun and wind on cotton, and it cannot be reproduced by a machine, though many have tried.
Canning season
Late summer into early fall, when everything the garden made comes in at once and has to be put up before it spoils. Tomatoes, beans, corn, pickles, jam. Hot kitchens in August, steam, vinegar, the sound of lids sealing as they cool.
Putting up is not a hobby. It is how a household eats in February.
Tent revival
A traveling revival meeting held under canvas, usually in summer, usually lasting several nights. Sawdust on the ground, the sides rolled up for air, hand fans from the funeral home, singing you can hear from the road.
The older form was the brush arbor — a temporary open-sided shelter built from poles and cut brush, made on the spot and left to fall apart afterward. Some places still call any outdoor meeting a brush arbor, whether or not there is any brush involved.
Burn pile
Brush cleared from a fence line or a field edge, stacked, and burned. Usually fall, sometimes early spring, always on a still day. It is the least romantic entry on this list and the one with the strongest smell — green wood resisting a fire, then giving in, then smoldering for two days afterward.
Molasses
In the southern mountains this almost always means sorghum molasses, not the sugarcane kind. Sorghum cane is cut in early fall, crushed to get the juice out, and boiled down in a long shallow pan for hours until it darkens and thickens.
It was community work. A molasses stir-off drew neighbors, and the skimming and stirring went on all day. What comes out is thinner and greener-tasting than cane molasses, with a bitterness at the edge that people either love or refuse entirely.
These words are not disappearing because anyone decided to stop using them. They are disappearing because the work is. You do not need a word for the cold snap during the blackberry bloom unless you are watching the blackberries.
We kept a few of them on bottles. It is not much of a preservation effort, but it is the one we had.
The Holler is a collection of Appalachian-inspired extraits from Maison Appalachia.