Appalachian Wisdom: Old Mountain Sayings That Still Hold Up
By H.D. Ingles
Now, I want to be upfront with you about something before we get started. I grew up hearing these sayings. Half of them I didn’t understand until I was old enough to realize I’d already lived them — and by then it was too late to do anything about it.
That’s the thing about mountain wisdom. It doesn’t explain itself. It just waits.
“Don’t dig up more snakes than you can kill.”
This is the one I wish somebody had tattooed on the back of my hand when I was twenty-two. The meaning’s plain enough: don’t start more problems than you’re equipped to finish. Don’t call out the neighbor over the fence line if you can’t afford a surveyor. Don’t pick a fight with your boss on payday Friday.
I have, at various points in my life, dug up an entire field of snakes. I’m a slow learner. But I got there.
“The higher up the mountain, the more wind.”
Success, responsibility, visibility — they all come with exposure. The folks down in the holler are comfortable. A little damp, maybe. But the wind can’t find them.
“You can’t plow a field by turning it over in your mind.”
The Appalachian equivalent of every motivational poster ever printed, except it smells like diesel and good sense. Thinking has its place. Planning has its place. But at some point you put your boot to the clutch and you go.
I have thought about a great many fields over the years. I’m proud to report a few of them actually got plowed.
“Still water and still people are apt to stink.”
Motion matters. Growth matters. A person who stops learning, stops laughing, stops being curious about what’s on the other side of the ridge — well. The mountain folks had a word for that condition too, and it wasn’t flattering.
“If you want your dinner to taste better, help cook it.”
You appreciate what you put your hands into. The meal you grew, the chair you built, the life you actually showed up for — those things satisfy in a way that the handed-to-you version never quite does.
“A whistling woman and a crowing hen always come to no good end.”
All right, look. I’m not endorsing this one. I’m reporting it. The mountain sayings don’t all hold up equally — this is the disclaimer I should’ve put at the top of this post.
“The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.”
I didn’t grow up hearing this one — I came to it later. But when I found it, I recognized it the way you recognize your own kitchen when you walk in from a long trip.
It means what you think it means. The person who said the careless thing, did the careless thing, walked away from the careless thing — they’ve long since moved on. The one it happened to is still standing there with the mark in them.
Handle people accordingly.
“Tend to your own taters.”
Four words. No unnecessary syllables. Tends to work in any situation where you find yourself overly invested in somebody else’s business.
There’s a particular kind of education that doesn’t show up in a classroom. It came from porches and woodsheds and the back of pickup trucks and long silences after supper. It came from people who didn’t have a lot of letters after their names but had the kind of intelligence that comes from paying attention to the world for seventy or eighty years and drawing your own conclusions.
I can’t tell you everything they knew. I’m still working on it myself.
But I can write it down. And maybe some of it’ll be waiting for you when you need it.
That’s about the best any of us can do.
H.D. Ingles is a humorist, author, and the man behind RUNutsNetwork.com — Official Merch for the Officially Nuts. If this post made you think of somebody you ought to call, go ahead and call them. The merch will still be here when you get back.
