Happy Sunday!

Blame it on the weather. Or the wooly worm. Heck, blame it on Rio, if you must.

But for whatever reason, this week we continue our series titled “Whatchew Puttin’ On Your Hot Buttered Biscuits” with an old southern standby you know and love.

There’s also another observation from the front porch and our lastest “Know Your Appalachian Neighbors” feature below.

If you haven’t already done so, subscribe and receive the free newsletter in your inbox every Sunday at thewaynetrain.com

- Wayne K.

Be careful volunteering to stir apple butter.

It sounds like a small favor. Take hold of the paddle, move it around a little, enjoy the fire. A pleasant way to spend a few minutes on an October afternoon.

Then you discover everybody else has gone to get something.

More apples. More wood. A cup of coffee. Something from the truck that apparently requires a search warrant.

You’re still stirring.

Apple butter has no butter in it, which is a disappointing thing to learn if you’ve been giving the dairy industry credit. It’s apples cooked down into a thick spread, often with cider, sugar and spices. The name refers to what it does on bread.

What it does on a hot biscuit ought to have a name of its own.

On October 17, Wade’s Mill in Raphine, Virginia, will hold its 30th annual Apple Butter Festival. Glenn Wilson will cook a batch over an open fire in a copper kettle more than 130 years old. Visitors can take a turn at the long-handled paddle.

That kettle was already working before most of our grandparents were born.

I wonder how many people have stood beside it and said, “Surely that’s about done.”

The apples have to soften. The water has to cook away. The mixture thickens, and somebody has to keep it moving so it doesn’t scorch. An old apple butter recipe preserved by West Virginia University’s libraries calls for a 40-gallon copper kettle and continuous stirring.

Forty gallons.

That’s a considerable amount of toast waiting to happen.

Before anybody gets to the stirring, there are apples to deal with. A basket of apples looks cheerful sitting beside a porch chair. Put a knife in your hand and three more baskets at your feet, and the arrangement loses some of its charm.

Still, work like that gives people time to talk.

You can discuss the weather, somebody’s new baby, somebody else’s bad hip. You can establish who bought the property up the road and whether they paid too much. Given enough apples, you might settle a disagreement that started at a church supper in 1987.

Or start it again.

Then comes the kettle, the fire and the paddle.

There’s something sensible about having a job that keeps your hands busy while your mouth goes on about its business. Nobody has to announce that they’re gathering to strengthen community ties. They need another person to stir. You happen to be standing there.

The visiting takes care of itself.

It’s easy to get sentimental about this sort of thing, especially from a comfortable chair. The people doing the work might appreciate somebody putting down the nostalgia and picking up the paddle.

They’ve got smoke in their clothes. Their arms are tired. There’s still cleaning up to do.

But eventually the batch is ready, and there’s that dark, thick apple butter, smelling of fruit and spice, waiting for bread.

October has plenty of things we can admire from a distance. A hillside turning red. A bright maple beside a fence. Mist lifting out of a hollow.

Apple butter asks a little more of us.

Somebody has to bring the apples. Somebody has to mind the fire. Somebody has to stay beside the kettle when it would be easier to wander off.

And somebody, having done none of those things, will arrive just in time to ask whether there’s anything to eat.

Give him a biscuit.

Then hand him the paddle.

You got new shoes for school.

Every fall.

Bought before the first bell, tried on in the store while your mama pressed her thumb down on the toe, feeling for growing room. You'd walk a lap around the display to prove they fit — stiff, squeaking — and she'd watch your face for the lie.

New shoes never fit easy. They punished a little. Stiff leather that bit the back of your heel till it wept, and you walked funny for a week, easing down on them like a colt figuring out its legs. Then one morning they gave. Molded to your foot. And you forgot you had them on at all.

First day, the whole school squeaked. Fresh soles on a waxed hall floor, a building full of us walking careful, nobody scuffed yet. You could hear September coming down the hallway.

You had your Blue Horse tablet. Blue horse on the front, just the head and neck, drawn in a few clean lines like somebody sketched it fast and got it right. The paper inside was gray and soft, one short step up from a paper sack. Pencil smudged the second your hand dragged across it. Erase too hard and you tore a hole straight through and sat there looking at your own desk through your homework.

You cut the points off the back and kept them. Blue Horse points. Save up enough and you could send off for something out of a catalog — a ball glove, a bicycle if you were dreaming big. I kept mine in a cigar box and counted them like money. Never did send off for a thing. Just liked knowing I could.

Crayons if you were lucky.

The eight-count box was everybody's box. Red, blue, that sad brown, the green nobody trusted. But the boy whose daddy worked steady, he had the sixty-four. The tall box. Sharpener built right in the back. He had colors with names you couldn't pronounce, and you'd sit there working a nub of "brick red" down to nothing, trying not to stare like the rest of us.

Leave a crayon on the radiator and it went soft. Bent over slow, like it was tired. Whole room smelled like warm wax by January.

Everybody showed up new the same morning. New shoes, new tablet, the smell of leather and pencil shavings hanging in the room. Somebody's fresh haircut, still itching at the neck. For one morning nobody'd wrecked a thing yet, and you all just sat there shining.

I've got closets full of shoes now. Boxes I forget I own.

Can't recall a single pair the way I remember those.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Ezekiel Neal went looking for salt.

It was 1845, down on the South Fork of the Little Barren River. A man over on the East Fork had a salt well and was making good money off it. Neal figured the ground might be generous twice. He rigged up a drill that ran on hand power and horse power and started down.

At 180 feet, the ground answered back.

The state historical marker says the pressure blew water, auger and shafting up over the top of a big sycamore. Anybody who has ever dug a post hole and hit something he didn't plan on can feel that one in the knees.

Then somebody tasted it. Not salt. Sulphur, magnesium and iron. It smelled exactly like you'd expect.

Neal had drilled for a fortune and struck a stink.

People drank it anyway. Stomach trouble, nerves, whatever ailed you, the water was supposed to help. Neal opened his house as a hotel. A village grew up around the well and took its name. In 1903 the Beula Villa Hotel went up across from it, with a front porch better than a hundred feet long, a dance hall and a bowling alley. It ran for sixty-five years.

Keep that story handy. Metcalfe County has a habit of going after one thing, finding another, and making a living off it anyway.

Metcalfe sits in south-central Kentucky, in the Pennyrile, about eighteen miles east of Glasgow. Ten thousand people, 290 square miles, one incorporated town. That town is Edmonton, and there's a lot of road between the mailboxes.

The county is young as Kentucky counties go. It was carved out in May 1860 from pieces of five others: Adair, Barren, Cumberland, Green and Monroe. They named it for Thomas Metcalfe, governor from 1828 to 1832, a man known as Old Stonehammer because he was a stonemason before he was anything else. The marker on the courthouse lawn says he laid the foundation for the governor's mansion in 1797, long before he held the job. Cholera killed him in 1855. Five years later the county got his name.

The 2020 census counted 10,286 people here. The estimate for 2025 is 10,583. Not a boom. A county holding its ground and picking up a few new neighbors.

Now the neighbors.

Rollin Sullivan was born in Edmonton in 1919, one of ten children. He and his older brother Johnny played string band music around the region in the thirties. By 1944 Rollin was working tent shows with Eddy Arnold, and in 1946 Arnold paired him with a guitarist named Lloyd George to open his shows. George played it straight. Sullivan told the jokes.

They called themselves Lonzo and Oscar. Rollin was Oscar.

They were on the Grand Ole Opry by 1947. The songs people remember are "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" and "I'm My Own Grandpa," which they were the first to perform. They were also, reportedly, the first Opry act with its own custom tour bus.

When George left in 1950, brother Johnny took over as Lonzo and stayed until he died in 1967. Another Lonzo followed. Rollin kept going until 1999 and died in 2012 at ninety-three. A boy from Edmonton made the Opry laugh for the better part of forty years.

Which brings us to the Practice House.

It sits on the Young family farm outside Edmonton, and it has been making noise since 1968. That's when brothers Richard and Fred Young and their cousins Greg Martin and Anthony Kenney started a Southern blues-rock band called Itchy Brother. Nashville was eighty-five miles off. Richard Young has said it felt like a million.

The band went through lineups and lean years. In 1986 the Youngs and Martin regrouped as the Kentucky Headhunters, with brothers Doug and Ricky Lee Phelps. Their 1989 debut, Pickin' on Nashville, poked at the town in its own title, and the town loved it anyway. Four straight Top 40 country singles: "Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine," "Oh Lonesome Me," "Dumas Walker" and "Rock 'n' Roll Angel." More than two million copies. A Grammy. Country Music Association awards for Album of the Year and Vocal Group of the Year.

Pick on a town in the title and the town hands you its biggest trophy.

In 2001, two Edmonton kids who had been playing music together since their early teens started a band of their own. Chris Robertson and John Fred Young formed Black Stone Cherry on June 4 of that year. John Fred is Richard Young's son. The band took over the Headhunters' Practice House and wore it out. The debut album came in 2006. The road took them to Europe and to arenas. After that first record, Robertson's old school principal invited them home for a show in Edmonton. In 2024 the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame inducted them.

Same building. Same county. Thirty-three years apart.

When you go, eat at the Lighthouse Restaurant in Sulphur Well, which puts you right back where Ezekiel Neal started.

It has served family style since 1985. Country ham, fried chicken and catfish come to the table in bowls and platters, and you keep asking until you quit. Biscuits. Fried apples. Red-eye gravy for the ham. It's open Thursday through Saturday, eleven to seven, and reservations are required on Saturdays. By its own count, Kentucky Living magazine has named it Best in Kentucky five years running.

A roadside park on Highway 70 marks the well. Eat first.

Come see your neighbors.

THE SKY ABOVE

The moon's taking the week off.

New moon was Saturday, so the sky is about as dark as it gets, with nothing but a thin sliver hanging low after sunset. First quarter doesn't show up until next Sunday the 18th. After that the moon starts crowding out the stars again.

So use it. And use the hour before dawn.

Mars is crossing the Beehive Cluster this morning and again tomorrow. Straight through the middle of it.

The Beehive is around a thousand stars, roughly 600 light-years off. The Romans called it Praesepe, which means manger. Look east before sunrise. Binoculars work best, and you'll find the cluster a little below the midpoint of a line from Castor to Regulus. What you get is a reddish planet sitting in a patch of glitter.

Check again Monday. Mars will have moved.

Then Friday morning the 16th, Mars, Jupiter and Regulus line up in a row, a bit like the belt in Orion, except none of the three match. Jupiter's the one you can't miss.

Late at night, keep an eye out for slow ones. The Taurids are running, with an early peak around the 12th and 13th. Don't get excited. Five to ten an hour on a good night, and in most years about one in a hundred is a real fireball. But Taurids are slow, and when one comes it takes its time crossing the sky, long enough to say "look at that" and have somebody look. Around midnight is best, with Taurus climbing in the east.

Saturn's still up all night, a week past opposition. Low in the east-southeast after dark, a steady pale-yellow dot. It doesn't twinkle.

The Orionids peak the night of the 21st into the 22nd, but a fat moon will wash most of them out. This week is the better bet.

THE GROUND BELOW

The snowbirds are back.

Look under the feeder. Slate-gray back, white belly, pink bill, and when one takes off, a flash of white on the outer tail feathers. Dark-eyed junco is the proper name. Snowbird is the old one, because they tend to turn up before the first snow does.

Some of them never left. Up high, above about 4,000 feet in East Tennessee anyway, juncos stay all year and nest on the grassy balds and in the conifers. The mountain birds run a bit shorter in the wing than the northern ones that come south to join them every winter. A lot of the rest just drop down to the foothills for the cold months.

They travel in flocks of ten to thirty, and the flock keeps a pecking order. First bird to your yard outranks the others. Juncos feed on the ground, and they like millet better than sunflower seed. Scatter some under a shrub and see who shows up.

Frost is right behind them.

The National Weather Service in Jackson, Ky. went through thirty years of records and found the median first frost at most eastern Kentucky stations lands somewhere between October 9th and 21st.

Where you fall in that window depends on where you sit. Cold air settles low, so the narrow hollows go first. River valleys hold off longer, because fog keeps the temperature up. The ridges, up in what the Weather Service calls the thermal belt, can go a good while later.

Hollow folks, expect to be first. Ridge folks, enjoy it.

Throw a sheet over what's left of the tomatoes and see what the morning says.

Sources:

Sky at Night Magazine, Mars and Jupiter in October 2026 (Mars in the Beehive Oct 11-12; Mars/Jupiter/Regulus line on Oct 16): https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/mars-jupiter-october-2026

Sky at Night Magazine, Beehive Cluster (finding it with binoculars, Castor to Regulus): https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/beehive-cluster

EarthSky, Praesepe/Beehive (about 1,000 stars, Praesepe = manger): https://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/praesepe-beehive-cluster

NASA, What's Up October 2026 (moon phases: new Oct 10, first quarter Oct 18; Orionids Oct 21-22): https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/whats-up-october-2026-skywatching-tips-from-nasa/

Star Walk, Taurids 2026: https://starwalk.space/en/news/november-2019-southern-taurids-meteor-shower

EarthSky, Taurid meteors (about 1% fireballs in most years): https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/taurid-meteors-all-you-need-to-know/

Astrobackyard, October 2026 astronomy: https://astrobackyard.com/october-2026-astronomy/

Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, Dark-eyed Junco: https://www.tn.gov/twra/wildlife/birds/grassland-and-shrub-birds/dark-eyed-junco.html

Blue Ridge Country, Birds of the Blue Ridge: Dark-eyed Junco: https://blueridgecountry.com/blogging/birds-of-the-blue-ridge/birds-of-the-blue-ridge-dark-eyed-junco/

Farm and Dairy, Dark-eyed juncos: https://www.farmanddairy.com/?p=161998

Cumberland/Maurice River newsletter PDF, Dark-eyed Junco (snowbird name): https://cumauriceriver.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Dark-Eyed-Junco-SNJ-ed-docx-sm.pdf

National Weather Service Jackson, 1991-2020 Frost/Freeze Climatology of Eastern Kentucky: https://www.weather.gov/jkl/frostfreezeclimo

The Wayne Train pulls out of the station every Sunday morning. Subscribe for free:
👉 thewaynetrain.com