“The man with an experience is never at the mercy of the man with an argument,” said the Holiness preacher. This line keeps coming back to me this year. It can and did indicate anti-intellectualism. I prefer to frame it, however, in terms of anti-rationalism, the critique of the idea that the rational mode of thought is, or at least ought to be, the clearest path to truth. Fresh out of Holiness churches during my cage stage Lutheranism, my parents, Rachel, and I were having Sunday dinner.

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Having read the beans section of The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, I went in search of heirloom seeds. Behold, the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center. After a bit of poking around, I settled on Doyce Chambers Greasy Cut-Short and some Pine Mountain Greasy. The former because they have a solid reputation and the latter because Pine Mountain is not all that far from my ancestral Kentucky counties. They both should be good for either cooking in the pod or drying as soup beans.

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Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: [In Irish houses of the old style] it is bad manners to knock and for the host to keep you waiting at the door. You go into the house to the fire, the fire the centre of the hearth, the hearth the centre of the kitchen, the kitchen of the house, the house of the farm (‘the home place’), and so onwards goes what Glassie calls a culture of centres, one around which cyclical time revolves.

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We were visiting with my in-laws this evening, talking about all sorts of things. Eventually the conversation turned to our worries about caring for my mom. My mother-in-law had been talking about her experience caring for a relative when, at one point, she launched into the most powerful two-minute sermon about trust in God I’ve ever heard. I had tears in my eyes. If she would have made an altar call, I would have responded.

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A friend recently said that he identifies more with his grandparents than his parents. I agreed, and with some more thought I think I know why. A brief overview of the four turnings model of Anglo-American history, if you’re not already familiar. Quotes are taken from the book, focusing on the last two cycles. I suspect historians would hate the four turnings idea, but it’s been a very useful mental model for me.

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Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: The dwelling is also a constitutive part of the relationship between past and present generations, between the living and the dead. Something handed on, or hoped to be handed on, something to be received. When the dead have a foundational role in human life, as is the case with peasants, then the house takes on a cosmological significance. But the house remains eminently material at the same time.

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