Ya'll Come On Down To Hillbilly Days

When I was a little girl it would embarress me if someone mentioned the word "hillbilly". That word brought the stigma of someone with broken teeth and bibbed overalls and no shoes and a string of younguns with rotten teeth. So that kinda scared me. But later the word hillbilly sort of made me think of country music and beans and corn bread and sallit greens. I never thought of myself as a hillbilly but I guess if you live up here in the hill country you are a hillbilly. My dictionary says a hillbilly is "a person who lives in or comes from the mountains or backwoods."But use to the backwoods housed only old raw-board houses with coal stored under the floor and chickens clucking around the yard and an outhouse sitting over the creek. Now the lawyers and doctors have ended up with the backwoods. My grandmother and grandfather owned a 'complete head of a holler and they had cattle, horses,hogs,livestock and a garden that extended from mountain to mountain. They gardened and lived practically off the land. They also had a saw mill and employed about 50 people. Now that land belongs to a lawyer who built a mansion on that estate.In my memory there will always be a country home where us grandkids romped the hills and crawled in caves and back inside my grandpa's coal mine. Nothing ever stays the same. ....