This Side of the Mountain

This Side of the Mountain Sidney Saylor Farr Seasons of the Heart We speak of changes in the weather-the cold season, the flu season, the rainy season. And the changing seasons in our lives. For all of my life I have felt the turning seasons in my heart; lately another dimension has been added-I also feel them in my bones. I grew up in the world of nature; sometimes I felt that trees, rocks, creeks, and the earth itself were part of my blood, muscles, and bones. My heart has always been intimate with each season's bounty and has always resisted any hint of a coming change. Sometimes I have felt that I could not bear to see the promise of summer when red and white clover bloomed and green corn uncurled; when butterflies came in clouds of color, and a misty rain settled down. I glory in the fall season, even with the melancholy of things coming to an end, and the haunting look and feel of crisp chilly nights and the smell of Indian summer smoke. I wanted to hold on to these things along with the gold dust of fall evenings. How wonderful it would be if we could hoard the golden days in a treasure chest, and in the dead of winter, take them out to again see a day of sunshine and blue skies. Gray days and cold rain usher November along to December. When snowy days of winter file across the land of summer's dead, I think how they look like gray nuns walking through an orchard counting seasons lost; counting those ahead. In springtime, summer, and fall, I feel that I will live forever. But there's something about the winter season that reminds me of my own mortality. Human life, too, comes in seasons and cycles. We each have our own appointed time to be born, to live, and to die. We try not to dwell on the end of time for us, choosing to look forward to springtime when nature will be fresh and new and, hopefully, we also will be renewed. Personal changes have come in my life during 1998 and 1999. I have shared with you the fact of a small stroke last June. I have been working hard to overcome that episode, but recently there was another small stroke. Because of this deterioration in my health, I have realized that I can no longer edit this magazine. The summer issue will be the last one for me. James Gage, an English professor at Berea, has been named as the new editor. He comes on board in May and will be responsible for the fall issue. It is very heartening to me to know that Appalachian Heritage will live on. Winter days are now upon us, and we must each in our own way experience what life has in store for us. I would not want to live if I did not have the spring season to anticipate. But even in the dead of winter I can find promises of springtime on the horizon. I am looking forward to having personal time for my own writing, lecturing, and teaching, and looking forward to springtime again when the first faint tracings of green appear on bushes and trees. Then in such a short time the season turns to seeds in the ground, growing things, and new promises. Mountaintop Removal ? II III Beyond green ridges gray ones, blue; the starched sky fits snugly defining sunlight, black smoke. Reaching for sky hope, for tonnage, coal trucks kiss front-end loaders, in a tabernacle of dieseled incense. Bulldozers bury the ancient womb, reconstituting, reclaiming mountains, renaming greenness even sky. Behind Caudill's store crumpled asphalt lies like spent rubber spun by swollen tires in search of treasure beneath thick slate. Green ridges, blue fall pliant to bulldozer blades and yield, groaning, their firstborn, stratified tales. Beneath ridge tops trucks swell with coal descend and wind past oaks and pines houses, gardens, indifferent. Black ribbon climbs through greenness inexorably past cabins, trailers, limestone creek beds, a thousand stories. Beyond the trees, what rose descends: ridge tops, coal, trees, over-burden...