Going through Tennessee
OPINION —
The first day of autumn is almost here, and Tennessee is experiencing the birth pangs of fall. The colors are changing, the air is crisp, the natural scenery has become purely college football paraphernalia.
It’s a fine morning to drive across the Volunteer State. The sun is bright, the sky is cloudless. The Smoky Mountains have never looked so smoky.
Last night, I sang to a theater of people in Cookeville with a banjo on my knee. The audience suffered through my rendition of “Rocky Top.” They were nice enough to whoop and holler in all the right spots.
It’s difficult to sing the official fight song of the University of Tennessee when you’re an ardent University of Alabama fan. This isn’t because I carry old football grudges. I don’t. I let bygones alone. Truthfully, I barely remember the last time Tennessee played Alabama and beat us with a final score of 54 to 49 on October 15, 2022.
Even so, I like “Rocky Top.” Namely, because there is something about Tennessee that enchants me.
I don’t know what it is. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s the highland terrain. Could be, it’s all the winding highways which never seem to know which way they’re going.
The roads wander upways, downways, sideways, backways, past railroad crossings, across Purple Mountains Majesty, over the river and through the woods. Or directly past roadside vegetable stands.
Consequently, I just visited a little vegetable stand on a secluded highway, where an old man was sitting beneath a tent, selling produce put of plastic crates.
It was the handmade cardboard sign on the highway that attracted my attention first. The sign was made from a Sony flatscreen television carton, staked into the earth with a single two-by-four. “Homegrown Appels,” the large sign read.
The old man had a few varieties of “appels,” sitting on his little Sam’s Club table. They were misshapen fruits, green and red, with dirty, smudged skins. Flawed in every way. So you knew they were the real deal.
“Did you grow these apples yourself?” I asked.
He spit into a Mountain Dew bottle. Then he said no, he didn’t grow them. He said only God grew apples, all he did was pick them.
He went on to explain that the apple trees have been in his family for several generations. Each new generation plants a few new trees in the backyard. It’s a tradition.
And, God willing, the old man explained, his grandson will continue this cherished tradition if the boy would ever put his phone down long enough to make eye contact with another human being and get off his lazy aspirations and do something besides vegetate.
I ask how long he’s lived in these parts.
“I was born in Tennessee,” the old man says. “I’ve only left this state one time in my life.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Uncle Sam said I had to.”
The old man was called up to Vietnam where he completed one tour. He doesn’t elaborate on this experience, except to add:
“Every night when I was away, I prayed to come back home. I promised God, if He’d get me back alive, I would never leave again. Not for as long as I live.
“When I first got back home, my mom was crying on the porch, and she said, ‘How’s it feel to be back in Tennessee, John?’ And I looked around at all the hills and the mountains, and I told her, ‘Feels like heaven.’”
How ‘bout them appels.
Sean Dietrich is a columnist, novelist and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His column appears in newspapers throughout the U.S. He has authored 15 books.
