Tag: Mountain folk

Before the Chestnut Blight (Part II)

On By Dennis McHaleIn Motivational, Poetry, Relationships, Speaking, Uncategorized, WritingLeave a comment

Chestnut Tree

I’d say the chestnut tree
kept a lot of mountain people from starving to death.
Because if you was out in the mountain,
you wasn’t going starve to death.
There was too many chestnuts.
You might get tired of eating them,
but you wouldn’t starve to death.
And people used them back at that time.
You see, people used so many of them.
They would boil them for their young’uns and everything.
Because there wasn’t no running out there to the store.
There wasn’t no such thing as going to the store back then.
Nobody didn’t have it.
And they used that to survive, a lot of them did,
to keep from starving.
They sold them.
You didn’t run to the fruit market up there
just every time you’d need something.
No we didn’t.

Summer Moonshine (by Dennis McHale, 2017)

On By Dennis McHaleIn Poetry1 Comment

Moonshine

I remember this story my daddy told,
when he was a young man
– most of his life he was a lay minister
in the Baptist church down Brevard way;
but when he was a young man
he was fairly rough and restless
and made a good deal of whiskey
and during the depression he and a cousin
– there was no work,
it was really hard times in them mountains ,
so they would load up this model A Ford
with wood carvings they had whittled some,
(in the winter when they was no farmin’)
and moonshine whiskey and travel to Washington D.C.
and there were street vendors, ‘fore the capital building
and they would have a little place there on the street
where they would sell wood carvings,
but I guess where the real money came from,
enough money to pay for the gasoline,
was from them selling a little summer moonshine
to the politicians, I ‘spect, to wash the shame down.