Georgia Green Stamper – Georgia On Her Mind

It was one mile short of being a river, folks said when I was a child, and I believed them. Eagle Creek was our Nile, sustaining our livelihood, nurturing our culture. Its winding path had carved out our place on earth a million years before the mighty Ohio was born, mapping where the hearts of my people would rest. Even the edge of the sky stopped at a wall of tall, boney sycamore trees that grew along its banks.

The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who rise with the sun and those who don’t.
The morning folks cornered the world market on worms centuries ago, and have the best PR staff in the business. Early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise – oh, their press releases go on and on.
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sun come up. Oh, maybe in my youth when I pulled colicky babies through the night, but I lived in Ashland then, in a hilly forest cut off from the rest of the natural world by industrial smog.

For a 100 years, maybe 200, my Owen County family relied on growing tobacco for their economic health. Of course, they did not know how unhealthy smoking was for their bodies, but even understanding that as I do now, I am stunned that within a handful of years, six bent barns have come to stand empty.  Fertile fields lie fallow. And the mammoth tobacco auction warehouses that once dominated towns like Carrollton, Cynthiana, and Lexington have become, like dinosaurs, extinct overnight.

I hadn’t thought about hominy in years, much less eaten it, until last week when I was wandering in the Mega-Mart.
I stopped in my tracks when I spotted it hanging out on a bottom shelf near the back of the store. I felt like I’d bumped into an old friend, and so I picked up a can to say hello.