A Week Of Communal Living And Learning Is Okay, But We Could Skip The Singing
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
I wish a happy first week of summer to you all from here in the foggy hinterlands of the lower Appalachians. I’m living in a mountain cabin way up in the wilds of rural North Carolina for a week. Feels odd to start the summer season in wool socks. Seems backwards.
I’m staying at a place called John C. Campbell Folk School and I’m here to teach a week-long class about quilting. This place offers classes in all sorts of stuff – blacksmithing, weaving, woodworking, making those fancy little tied jig things for fly-fishing. The whole place is all modeled off of some sort of Danish philosophy about communal living where everyone eats together and “works” together and sings together.
While I do believe that everyone should eat and everyone should work if they can, I don’t believe everyone should sing. Specifically me. It’s awkward for me when they sing and I just stand there looking lame and accidentally judgmental while everyone else has a flat-out joyous hoe-down centered around brother and sisterhood. I don’t really know how I wound up here, as non-singer type, but I feel like an old-timey Quaker so at least I’m on the good side of history in that respect.
I agreed to come this folk school and teach this course under great trepidation. Not because I thought that maybe a communal folk school in 2024 is weird. It most certainly is; there is no question about that. But, this kind of weird is fun at best and, at worst, funny. So, it’s a win/win.
I was initially reluctant to come here and teach this class because I was cautious about leaving my two teenage boys alone in Yalobusha and Lafayette counties for the first week of summer without the watchful eye of me, their mother. My imagination runs wild at the possibilities of trouble they can get into. Of all my creative endeavors as an artist, I think the imagining of scenarios in which my teenage boys get arrested (or worse!) for sheer dumbness is where my true masterpieces exist.
In actuality, most of the Water Valley teenagers I know right now aren’t raising the Cain I’m imagining. Most of the kids I know are riding around aimlessly in/around/in-between Water Valley and Oxford, working summer jobs or graduating high school. They’re being more responsible than a lot of adults!
The oldest child in my groups of friends just graduated high school a couple of days ago and I absolutely cannot believe it. In my mind, she is still in first grade wearing some sort of construction paper hat! I vividly remember asking her mom how to register my kid for school at Davidson since she had done it the year before and I had absolutely no idea what to do. No one prepares the moms for not only Kindergarten registration but for when the first group of oldest kids start to graduate high school and become things like nurses, teachers or HVAC dudes.
Good job and good luck to all the Water Valley graduates! Be nice to your mamas because they miss you already. And when you come back to live with them for a few months because you’re broke and had a bad semester, behave and don’t stay out too late.
