. . . story mends and heals what has been harmed in the psyche, what has been left for dead at the roadside, or worn down simply by the living of life. (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
May stillness be upon your thoughts and silence upon your tongue! For I tell you a tale that was told at the Beginning — the one story worth the telling . . . (Celtic storyteller prologue)
It’s gettin’ toward storytelling time in Jonesborough, Tennessee. I can hardly wait. Sitting under ginormous tents, and listening hour after hour to funny, poignant, rich stories that bring smiles and tears and sometimes outright guffaws — what could be better than that?? Not much for me.
When I was a little girl, one of my very favorite things was when my mother or father told us stories about their own childhoods. Their actual experience was growing up dirt poor in Appalachia in the midst of the economic depression, but for me their tales were a rich cornucopia of feed sack dresses and homemade woolen stockings, a favorite cat named Tricks, huge milk cans full of lemon crackers made by Great Granma, Christmas decorations of sycamore balls and pine cones and an orange (if they were lucky) for a present, another granma who smoked a corncob pipe and talked about witches, tar and featherings, revinuers, spooks — so much wonder! Seeing a first car, eating a hot dog for the first time, all day church meetings, getting whipped with a hickory switch for telling a fib, walking miles to go to school in a one room schoolhouse . . . oh, the glory of those stories for me.
And when my Granma would come to visit for awhile, my sister and I got to take turns sleeping with her, and were put to sleep with even older stories than my parents’ glorious ones. To imagine my grandma following a bear over the mountain on her way home one evening, to hear about the mysterious spooks that hung out around her house all the time, to even entertain the notion of having to watch out for mountain lions in the branches of overhead trees — wow! My life as a little girl in the ’40s and ’50s was tame stuff in comparison.
I sometimes wonder, tho,’ if my own experiences as a child would sound equally exotic to children today. Things that I’ve written about in these pages, like playing booger in the cellar, and catching lightnin’ bugs in a mason jar, and no TV, and outhouses, and watermelon seed spittin’ contests (and if you swallow one of those seeds, you’ll grow a watermelon in your stomach), and Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues and Christmas “wishbooks,” and my mom making all my clothes until I was ( finally) out of school at age 26 — lotsa stories running amuck in my head without too many folks to tell ’em to . . .
This kind of storytelling tradition has perhaps suffered in the midst of our technological advancements and in our current cultural climate, but it’s still alive and well in some places, like Jonesborough, with the National Storytelling Center and Festival — and it’s no coincidence that Jonesborough is in the heart of the Appalachians. Mountain cultures like ours breed stories like flies; liars’ contests and swappin’ grounds and tall tales competitions abound.
And perhaps we’re finding new ways to tell our stories — and to listen. I’d like to think that was true about social media. I do know that telling and listening to stories about each others’ lives, both roles being equally important, are vitally important to claiming and valuing who we are, who we have been, who we will be.
So celebrate your story! — tell it as much as you can, especially to children. Listen to others, too — nothing can be a greater gift. And to those of you reading this, thank you for allowing me to tell you some of mine.