Think of it as a Sunday paper for Appalachia. Culture, history, food, and the kind of stories that don't make the evening news.

Somebody forwarded this your way. Good. Subscribe and make it official at thewaynetrain.com

Growing up in the country, the ground itself was trying to kill you.

Not fast. The country doesn't work fast. It kills you slow, with rust and rot and a plant that looks like every other plant until your whole arm swells up like a tick on a hound.

We didn't have safety. We had Mom.

And Mom had a list.

—

Top of the list was the rusty nail. You couldn't walk barefoot across a country yard without stepping on one. Old boards leaned against the barn like drunks, every one of them studded with nails that had gone orange years ago. Step on one and you didn't cry about the pain. The pain was nothing. You cried because you knew what came next.

Dr. David was coming.

It was really a thing back then. A doctor who came to the house.

Sounds cozy, don't it? Like something warm. It was not warm. It was a man in a Buick pulling up the driveway with a black bag, and in that black bag was a needle the size of a fence post.

He'd sit you on the kitchen table. Same table you ate supper on. He'd say, "This'll pinch."

It did not pinch. A bee pinches. This was different.

Tetanus, he called it. Lockjaw. Mom said if you didn't get the shot your jaw would clamp shut and you'd never eat again, which to a boy sounds partly like a threat and partly like a way out of green beans.

I took the shot. Every time. My arm would ache for two days and I'd walk around holding it like I'd been shot in a war I didn't fight in.

—

Then there was ptomaine poisoning.

Lord, the fear of ptomaine.

Mom warned about it constantly. Don't eat that, you'll get ptomaine. Left that potato salad on the counter? Ptomaine. Deviled eggs at a funeral, sitting out since the sermon started? You're playing with ptomaine, son.

Here's the part nobody in my family will admit to this day.

Not one of us knew what ptomaine was.

Not one.

It was just a word. A country boogeyman. A poison that lived in mayonnaise and church casseroles and anything that had seen the inside of a car trunk. You didn't need to understand it to fear it. Fear was the whole point.

I looked it up as a grown man. Turns out "ptomaine poisoning" isn't even really a thing doctors say anymore. It was old-timey language for regular food poisoning. All those years. All that dread. And Mom was basically just saying "don't eat the spoiled tater salad."

She could've just said that. But where's the fun in that.

—

And then, the big one.

The poison ivy.

Me and my brother got into it one summer afternoon over something important. I don't remember what. At that age everything's important and nothing is. Probably a bicycle. Probably a lie.

The fight moved, the way boy fights do, out of the yard and down into the ditch line. And the ditch line, if you know anything about the country, is where poison ivy holds its family reunions.

We rolled through all of it.

Face. Arms. Necks. Places I will not name in a family newsletter.

By the next morning we were two swollen creatures. Eyes near shut. Skin bubbling up in ropes. We looked like we'd been stung by everything God ever made with a stinger.

Both of us. Hospital.

Not Dr. David this time. This was a real drive to a real building. Two brothers in the back seat, itching so bad we couldn't even keep fighting, which is maybe the only good thing poison ivy ever did.

They dosed us with something. Slathered us in pink. Sent us home looking like we'd been dipped in Pepto and rolled in misery.

We did not fight again for a while.

—

People ask me why country folks are tough. Why we don't rattle easy.

It's because the childhood was a minefield. Rust in the dirt. Poison in the ditch. Death, apparently, hiding in the potato salad.

We survived all of it.

Sore arm. Empty stomach. Covered in pink lotion.

But we survived.

And to this day, I still won't eat a deviled egg that's been sitting out too long.

Thanks, Mom.

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.

Not a great picture, but he is camera shy. I have never seen a squirrel with a tail like that, have you?

There's a spider out there that spells your name and kills you for it.
That's the old Appalachian tale, anyway. Say your name out loud next to an orchard orb weaver, and if it spins your name into its web, you're done for. Never happened, of course. Pure folklore. But the spider itself is real, and it's crawling all over Kentucky orchards and fence rows right now — orange, black, and about as ornate as spiders get, which is exactly why folks get spooked.

Truth is, the only spiders around here worth worrying about are widows and recluses. This one's harmless as a housefly.

And it's got a resume. Only spider species Charles Darwin himself ever classified, back on the Beagle in 1832. Rode along on Skylab 3 in '73 to see if it could still spin a web with no gravity to speak of. It could.

Charlotte, from Charlotte's Web? Different species — a barn spider — but same family of web-writers. She spelled out SOME PIG and TERRIFIC. Never once spelled Wilbur's name.

Maybe she knew the legend too.

👉 Read the full story

Five kids and a snowboard shop. That's where this starts.
Winter of 2022, Banner Elk, North Carolina. Too cold for anybody with sense to be outside, and too cold inside too — because these five were practicing in the unheated back room of the Edge of the World Snowboard Shop. No heat. No plan. Just noise.

Four years later? 225,000 people a month pulling up their music on Spotify.

Somebody at a bar walked up drunk one night, looked at their merch table, and asked if they played "possum rock." The singer just shrugged. Said sure. Why not.

Now that's the genre. Possum rock. Made up by a drunk guy who probably doesn't remember saying it.

Salena Zito's got the whole story — Avery County, the cold room, the word-for-word singalongs from Texas to London. Worth the read.

👉 Read the full story

I really enjoyed this spring season, which now has turned into summer. Just being able to spend some time outside has been nice. The weather has really given us some extremely hot temperatures  here lately. I have to work around those temps to get my outside chores, early morning and late evening.

The smell of fresh-cut grass is a welcome scent. Watching the yard come back to life after the winter months have gone away is a great sight to see and certainly refreshing.

I love to look at the clouds. It brings back childhood memories when I would go outside and place a quilt on the ground and lie on my back and try to find different objects. There would be bears, baby dolls, cats, and dogs just to name a few. The imagination of a child, I find, can sometimes be a great adventure.

Sitting on the porch brings such peace as I watch nature take its course. Especially when a good, slow rain comes along. Just to listen to the sound of rain and feel the gentle breeze is so peaceful.

Watching the birds find their food, worms, bugs, and whatever it is that birds eat. Recently, there was a bird’s nest built on top of a gutter curved under the porch roof. It was so amazing just to watch as Mama bird kept bringing worms to the nest for her babies. I watched  for a few days and then one day, Mama bird no longer is coming to the nest. I suppose there are some young birds out there flying around.

I’m enjoying my flowers this summer. I took great care to plant them carefully so as to bring beauty when they all started blooming. There are assorted kinds of flowers in the porch planters, and to see them blossom and bring color to our outside setting space on our porch is beautiful.

Finding some time to spend with some close friends is a blessing to me. Laughing and reminiscing of past times together feels so rewarding, just knowing that life really did have some wonderful moments. Whether it was good times or bad, friends stay friends, and it only takes just a short while to catch up right where we left off the last time we were together.

It seems that time is much faster as I get older. As we well know, there are still twenty-four hours in a day, but honestly, I don’t feel like I get that much time. Does age really do that to a person?

Bible Verse of the Week

Psalm 32:11
Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous: And shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.

Gospel singer Kay Himes Knuckles has been sharing her music ministry in Eastern and Central Kentucky for more than 40 years.

Before Tennessee was Tennessee, it was here.

Not the whole state. Just the seed of it. A stretch of river bottom and ridge in the northeast corner where a handful of stubborn settlers decided they'd had enough of being governed by people who'd never seen the place.

Washington County is the oldest county in Tennessee. Established in 1777, back when Tennessee was still just the far western edge of North Carolina and nobody east of the mountains much cared what happened out here.

They named it for George Washington.

Sit with that a second. In 1777, Washington wasn't a president. Wasn't a monument. Wasn't a face on a dollar bill. He was a general losing more battles than he won, dodging the British through New Jersey with an army that was mostly barefoot. The war was nowhere near decided.

And these mountain people named their county after him anyway.

First county in the country to carry his name. They bet on the man before the bet paid off. That tells you something about the kind of people who settled here.

The kind who don't wait to see how it turns out.

👉 Read the full story

Know Your Appalachian Neighbors appears weekly in The Wayne Train.

The moon clocks out this week.

New moon comes Tuesday, July 14, a little before six in the morning (Space.com). Which means the middle of this week is about as dark as the sky gets around here. No moon to wash things out. Just black, and whatever's behind it.

Blackberries.

That's the headline down here this week. The brambles along the road banks and the old fence lines are coming ripe, and if you've got a patch you keep quiet about, you already know. Lower ground first. The high hollows run a couple weeks behind (Blind Pig and The Acorn). Wear sleeves. The thorns don't care about your feelings.

The black raspberries that came on back in late June are about spent. That window's short and it's closing (Swift Silent Deadly). Get what's left.

👉 Read the full story

Heat waves are nothing new. The Knoxville News Sentinel posted this picture of a Cleveland, Ohio milkman in July 1953. The caption says that during the recent heat wave, the milkman was so impressed with the shorts being worn by his customers, he decided to wear his own. And it made the news! This is an AI colorized version of the photo. Did you ever have milk delivered in those glass bottles?

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

If somebody forwarded this to you, climb aboard:
👉 thewaynetrain.com