Old expressions echo across distant hills

By: Sallie Rose Hollis

Maybe you’re more disciplined than I am.
Maybe you can scroll past all those reels on
your social media feed. Or maybe you’re so tremendously disciplined that you don’t
even HAVE a social media account.
I was once disciplined … but no more.
I’ve begun to linger, to tarry, to luxuriate in those enticing, those captivating,
those addicting seconds-long dopamine
loops. Granted, I haven’t migrated to the
cat videos yet, and until this week, I had
a variety of subjects appearing: Johnny
Depp. Parrots doing cute tricks. Babies
and small children.
But now, there’s just one long string of unbroken Appalachian Sam videos. Maybe in the
future I can break free, but for now, I’ve been
totally sucked in.
What drew me in and kept me coming back
was that the things he was saying that were so
“different” and so ingrained in Appalachia were
the same sayings I had heard all my life in those
piney hills of Union Parish.