The Sky Above

Get the lawn chair out. Not for this week, exactly. For next.

The Perseids are back. They run from the middle of July into late August, and they build the whole time. This week they're just clearing their throat. A handful an hour if you're patient and away from the porch light. Look northeast after midnight, closer to dawn if you can stand it.

The real show is August 12 and 13. And 2026 is a good one — the peak lands on a new moon. No moon means a black sky. A black sky means you catch the faint ones too, not just the show-offs. Some years the moon washes the whole thing out. Not this year.

The moon's already getting out of the way. It was full on July 29. By Wednesday the 5th it's down to half, coming up around midnight. By the weekend it's a thin sliver that doesn't rise till the small hours. So the early dark comes back just in time.

Think of it like sparks off a grinding wheel. Somebody up there leaning into the metal, and every so often one flicks loose and streaks off before it dies.

After supper, look west. That bright one that isn't a star is Venus, hanging low, sliding a little closer to the star Spica every night.

Before sunrise, look south. The steady gold one is Saturn — best thing in the morning sky right now. Reddish Mars sits low in the east. The thinning moon slips past Saturn from Sunday through Wednesday morning.

The Ground Below

Blackberries are on. You know that already. Your hands know it. Anybody with a fencerow and a bucket knows it.

The one worth learning this week is elderberry.

It grows all over Central Appalachia. Creek banks, ditches, the wet edge of a field, any disturbed ground nobody's mowed. Eight, ten feet tall. Back in May and June it wore those flat white lacy flower heads. Those flowers are berries now, and this week the clusters are just starting to darken. Deep purple. Near black. They don't all ripen at once, so you'll be at it a few weeks.

Here's the part you don't skip.

You cook them. Every time. Raw elderberries will make you sick — the berries, and worse, the stems and the leaves and the wood. They carry a compound that turns to cyanide, and raw it'll put you on your knees with your stomach in a knot. Heat kills it. Simmer them a good thirty minutes and they're fine, and they cook down into a syrup worth all the trouble.

Strip the berries off the stems before they go in the pot. Freeze the clusters a few hours first and they drop off easier. Pick only the deep-black ripe ones. No green, no red. And leave red elderberry alone altogether — different plant, bad news.

Not making this up. Back in 1983 out in California, eleven people ran raw berries through a strainer, stems and all, mixed it with juice, and drank it. Every one of them got sick. One landed in the hospital. They lived. But that's a rough way to learn to boil your fruit.

Leave some on the bush. The birds found it first.

This Week in Appalachian History

On August 6, 1945, a bomb called Little Boy fell on Hiroshima. The uranium inside it came out of the Tennessee hills.

They called the place Oak Ridge. The Secret City.

In 1942 it was farm country — families, tobacco, ridgelines. Then the government took a stretch of it west of Knoxville, fenced it off, and put up a city near overnight. They picked the spot on purpose. Cheap power off the TVA dams. Good water. And mountains all the way around to keep the rest of the world from looking in.

They planned for thirteen thousand people. By 1945 they had seventy-five thousand — the fifth-biggest city in Tennessee, and you couldn't find it on a map.

Most of them never knew what they were making.

They knew their one job. Turn this dial. Watch this gauge. Don't ask, don't talk, the posters said so. Down at the Y-12 plant — a building near a mile long, the biggest roof in the world back then — hill girls sat at machines pulling uranium apart and had no earthly idea. They just did the work. Pay was good, war was on, do your part.

Then it came over the radio on August 6. And the people who built the thing found out the same as everybody else.

The Oak Ridge paper ran a headline the next day. "Oak Ridge Attacks Japan."

Three days later a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. The war was over by the end of the month.

The girls at the dials went home and told nobody. There was still nobody they were allowed to tell.

A Closing Note

The new Census numbers came out this spring. One of them stuck with me.

Of the thirty coalfield counties in eastern Kentucky, twenty-nine now bury more than they birth. More people dying every year than getting born. Only one county came out on the right side of it. Whitley. And just barely — by sixteen.

Sixteen more born than buried. In a whole year. In a whole county.

It used to be the young ones leaving that thinned us out. That's not it anymore. The ones who stayed got old, and there aren't enough behind them to hold the line.

You can drive these roads and not see it. A porch is still a porch. But the county's a little emptier than it was last August. It'll be emptier still next August.

Sixteen.

That's the whole margin.