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Happy Decoration Day!

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🚂 WELCOME ABOARD
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This week on The Wayne Train:

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🗞 FEATURED STORY
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Walk into any old-time hardware store in May and you'll find two things on the impulse rack near the register. American flags in a bucket. And artificial flowers in colors God never put in nature.

Fake daisies the shade of electric lime. Carnations that match a traffic cone. Nobody's buying those for their living room.

They're for the graves.

Memorial Day gets the cookouts and the mattress sales and the TV tributes with the swelling music. Fine. It deserves all that. But in the hills, the real reckoning with the dead happens somewhere quieter, usually on a hillside behind a church that hasn't been full on a regular Sunday in thirty years.

They called it Decoration Day long before Washington declared anything official.

The tradition runs through the whole Upland South — cleaning a community cemetery, decorating graves with flowers, holding a church service, and eating together on the grounds. Folklorists will tell you these gatherings seem to predate the post-Civil War commemorations that eventually became our national holiday. Mountain people didn't wait for a federal decree. They had their own calendar.

Each cemetery picked its own day. The second Sunday in June, say. And as it approached, people came out to clean, repair, mow, and weed. Not because a law said to. Because that's how you took care of your people.

I grew up watching this happen. The tools coming out of truck beds. The older women directing traffic. Somebody always showing up with a push mower held together by prayers and rust. Kids weaving between headstones while the adults worked.

Old flowers and leaves got cleared away. Grass got cut. And then came the new ones — bright flowers and small mementos, things that reminded families of who was in the ground.

The fake ones in the neon colors. Yes, those.

Don't laugh. On a Kentucky hillside in early June, a grave covered in plastic carnations that'll survive into the next presidential administration is a love note written by someone who couldn't find the words.

Decoration Day is also about the living. It heals rifts. Reconnects kinship networks. Gives scattered families a fixed point on the map to return to. You don't drive three hours for the dead. You drive three hours because your cousin's kids have gotten tall and your aunt makes the only coconut cake left on earth worth eating.

The dead are the reason. The reunion is the thing.

After the graves were tended, families gathered for singing, a sermon, and then dinner on the grounds — a potluck picnic where storytellers got to work and children ran loose and the whole afternoon stretched out like it had nowhere to be.

That's church. That's the real kind.

In southern Appalachia, the tradition stayed alive long after it faded elsewhere. Some communities still erect wooden shelters over graves to protect them from the elements — grave shelters you can still find as far north as Kentucky and West Virginia. If that sounds odd to you, you've never tried to keep flowers standing in a mountain thunderstorm.

The national holiday got renamed, reframed, and handed over to car dealerships. The mountain version never needed a press release.

Appalachians have been practicing Decoration Day all their lives. It's not a history lesson. It's a Saturday in May with dirty knees and a plate of somebody's deviled eggs and the specific, unrepeatable smell of a churchyard after rain.

My grandmother would have recognized it. Her grandmother would have recognized it before her.

The country finally got around to making it official.

We had already been doing it for a hundred years.

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📡 APPALACHIA 250
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Doesn't matter where you live. Doesn't matter if you've never set foot east of the Mississippi or climbed a mountain higher than a parking garage. If you sat down to supper tonight, there's a good chance you ate off an Appalachian table.

You just didn't know it.

Long before the first Scots-Irish family came over the gap with a milk cow and a grudge, the Cherokee had been farming these mountains for more than a thousand years. They weren't scratching at the dirt and hoping for the best. They were running one of the most sophisticated agricultural systems in the world. A system built around three crops that they called, in their language, sisters.

Corn. Beans. Squash.

Plant them together in the same mound of earth, and something almost magical happens. The corn grows tall and gives the beans a stalk to climb. The beans pull nitrogen out of the air and put it back into the soil. The squash spreads out wide at the base, shading the ground, holding in moisture, killing the weeds before they get started.

It's not luck. It's not folklore. It's centuries of watching, learning, and passing the knowledge down. It's agriculture as precise as anything done on a university research farm today, except it didn't require a grant.

The Cherokee name for corn — "selu" — is also the name of the First Woman in their creation stories. Think about that for a second. The crop wasn't just food. It was identity. It was theology. It was the center of the whole world.

Cherokee villages were surrounded by vast cornfields. Gardens were planted beside rivers and streams. Women were the primary farmers. They were also the keepers of the seed stock, the ones who knew which variety grew best on north-facing slopes, which bean held up through a dry August, which squash would keep in a root cellar until February.

That knowledge didn't disappear. We just stopped saying where it came from.

Walk into any diner in eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, or southwest Virginia right now.

Chances are soup beans and cornbread are somewhere on the menu.

That's it. That's the whole meal. A pot of pinto beans slow-cooked with a ham hock. A skillet of cornbread browned hard on the bottom. Maybe some sliced onion on the side, if that’s your thing.

One of Appalachia's most iconic dishes — soup beans and cornbread — is a filling, soulful inheritance from Native Americans.

People write about this food like it's poverty food. Like cornbread and beans are what you eat when there's nothing else. And I'll admit — there were times in the mountains when that was true. Hard times. Long winters. Lean years.

But soup beans and cornbread isn't a failure. It's a formula. Protein. Carbohydrate. Fat. Warmth. It's a nutritionally complete meal that mountain people — Cherokee first, settlers after — figured out how to make from what the land provided. The James Beard Foundation has started to agree. Took them a while.

Then there are the ramps.

If you don't know ramps, you haven't been paying attention. They're wild mountain leeks, pungent as all get out, and they show up for about three weeks every spring in the hollows and creek banks of the southern Appalachians. They smell like garlic and onion had an argument and neither one won.

The Cherokee gathered ramps ceremonially for over 12,000 years. They used them as a spring tonic — to wake up the body after a long winter — and as a remedy for colds and croup.

Twelve thousand years.

The Republic of the United States of America is 250 years old this summer. We've had sixteen presidents in my lifetime. Ramps were already old before Egypt built its first pyramid.

Local Cherokee members still gather wild ramps from family ramp patches in locations that are kept secret. They harvest carefully, taking only the young tips and leaving the roots intact so the plants keep growing.

Not long ago, ramps were considered poor folks' food. Something to be embarrassed about. A public school teacher is said to have once kicked a student out of class for smelling like them.

Now they're on the menus at restaurants in New York City for fourteen dollars a plate. The mountains always were ahead of everybody. It just takes the rest of the country forty years to notice.

The pawpaw grows wild in these hills too. Looks like a mango, tastes like a banana crossed with a mango, and it's been feeding people in this region since long before there was a region. Pawpaws, elderberries, fox grapes, persimmons, black walnuts — these are all native to Appalachia, and all of them fed the people who lived here first.

The Candy Roaster squash. First bred by the Cherokee in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Still grown by families up in the North Carolina mountains today. Seed to seed to seed, passed down through generations, outlasting the government's best efforts to take everything else.

Every Fourth of July weekend, from here to California, somebody is going to throw corn on a grill. They're going to serve it on a table that probably has beans on it somewhere. Maybe cornbread. Maybe squash. Definitely something that came from the agricultural knowledge of the people who farmed these mountains first.

And nobody's going to say a word about where it came from.

The American dinner table is an Appalachian table. And before it was an Appalachian table, it was a Cherokee table. A table set with patience and knowledge and the kind of farming science that didn't need a laboratory because the laboratory was the mountain.

We just showed up hungry and sat down.

The least we can do is know whose table it is.

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📡 DISPATCHES FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
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The other day I asked artificial intelligence a question that sounded like something cooked up by a late-night science fiction writer:

“I just read somewhere that your body has enough DNA to stretch from the sun to Pluto and back more than 10 times,” I started. “That can’t be true, can it?”

I figured I’d get a short answer. Maybe a sentence or two.

Instead, I wound up staring at my computer like a man who had just seen a raccoon drive a pickup truck.

The answer, in short, is that every cell in your body contains roughly six feet of DNA. Multiply that by the trillions of cells inside you and suddenly your personal DNA collection stretches across the solar system like cosmic fishing line.

How is that possible?

“DNA is only about two nanometers wide,” AI helpfully explained.

That means a strand of DNA is around 40,000 times thinner than a human hair.

I had to stop for a second and think about that.

Nature somehow stuffs six feet of microscopic genetic instructions into a cell nucleus smaller than a speck of dust. And it does this trillions of times without the whole thing tying itself into a knot like Christmas lights in a shoebox.

I sat there thinking: We are walking around inside biological miracles and most of us are mainly worried about whether the Duke’s mayonnaise in the refrigerator is still good.

But the deeper point hit me later.

We are living in an age where ordinary people can ask extraordinary questions whenever they want.

No chemistry degree required.
No encyclopedia set.
No trip to the library.
No waiting three weeks for a magazine article.

Just curiosity.

That may be the biggest revolution of all.

A few nights ago I asked AI another simple question:

“How many atoms are in a human body?”

The answer was around seven octillion.

That’s a 7 followed by 27 zeroes.

To put that into perspective, if every atom were a grain of sand, you’d have enough sand to bury entire continents.

Then I asked another one:

“What happens if you remove all the empty space from every atom in the human body?”

According to physics, the entire human race could fit inside a sugar cube.

A sugar cube.

At that point I didn’t need coffee anymore. I needed counseling.

And this is what fascinates me about artificial intelligence when it’s used the right way. Not as a gimmick. Not as a shortcut factory for lazy people. But as a curiosity machine.

The real magic is not that AI already knows these answers. The magic is that it encourages people to ask questions they might never have asked before.

That matters.

Because curiosity is fuel.

A curious person learns.
A curious person grows.
A curious person stays mentally alive.

I worry sometimes that modern technology is making people shallower. There’s certainly evidence of that. We scroll too much, skim too much, argue too much, and think too little.

But there’s another side to this story.

For the first time in human history, a retired newspaperman sitting in Kentucky can ask a machine about DNA, atoms, black holes, Roman roads, Appalachian history, quantum physics, or why tomatoes split after heavy rain, and get an answer in seconds that would have taken serious research not long ago.

That’s astonishing.

When I was younger, if somebody wanted to know something complicated, you either:

Now the information is sitting there waiting.

The limiting factor is no longer access.

It’s imagination.

Maybe that’s the challenge of this new age. Not whether artificial intelligence can think for us. But whether it can remind us to think bigger ourselves.

Because sometimes all it takes is one strange little question about DNA to remind you how unbelievable this world really is.

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.

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🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
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Science says El Nino will bring the heat this summer …
You felt it in April.

Something wasn't right. Too warm too soon. The kind of warm that makes old-timers squint and check the calendar twice.

Knoxville just logged its warmest April in 153 years of keeping records. Nashville, Chattanooga, Oak Ridge — same story. And now the scientists are telling us why.

El Niño is coming. A big one.

Experts say the picture for Southern Appalachia is more nuanced than most of the country, and that's worth paying attention to. Because around here, nuance usually means nobody's coming to help and you'd better figure it out yourself.

The good news, according to Dr. Andrew Joyner — Tennessee's state climatologist over at ETSU — is that a strong El Niño probably won't hammer us the way it does other regions. The less good news is that it could cut us off from Gulf moisture heading into fall, setting up drier-than-average conditions right when we don't need them.

Drought's already knocking on the door.

Phys.org has the full breakdown of what this means for our corner of the mountains. Worth a read before you plant that second round of tomatoes.

👉 Read the full story

… which is bad news for approximately 40,000 households in Kentucky
Summer hasn't even officially shown up yet and already you can feel it leaning on the door.

And if you live in Wolfe County, or Letcher, or Harlan — you might be feeling it more than most.

New numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau show that nearly 40,000 Kentucky homes have no air conditioning at all. Statewide, that sounds like a rounding error. But zoom in on the map and you'll see exactly where those homes are clustered.

Eastern Kentucky. Appalachia. Same counties that always seem to get the short end.

Wolfe County leads the list — nearly one in ten homes without AC. Letcher, Harlan, Lee, and Owsley right behind it.

Now pair that with what we told you about El Niño bearing down on the region, and you've got yourself a long, hard summer in the making for folks who can least afford it.

WKYT has the numbers. Worth knowing which counties we're talking about — and worth remembering there are real people sitting in those houses.

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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It’s a very peaceful morning here in Eastern Kentucky, in my small part of the world.

Listening to the gentle and relaxing sound of the rain that smells like the scent of freshness and purity. The cool temperature is literally like a breath of fresh air.

The dust of life is being washed from the trees, shrubs, bushes, and our garden plants, bringing about the beauty of fresh color to enhance the newness of nature.

I’m thinking about a house and a home today. First, let me say I’m very thankful to God in Heaven that I have both, a house and a home.

To me, a house is a dwelling place, a place I can spend time at or stay for a while. Houses can be made of many substances. Over my years, I’ve stayed in many types of houses, not necessarily those just made of wood. There have been mobile homes, tents, campers, motels, and hotels, resorts, and cruise ships to name a few. All of these were my house at the time. A place I could retreat to for my own privacy.

But then there’s the home. Home is a place that I can hang my hat and be at peace with my surroundings.

Home is a place to be comfortable with those I love and cherish, my family. A place of trust and respect for each other.

My home is where I can invite my family and friends to come in for a time of entertainment and a joyful gathering.

A place where I can go to the cabinets and refrigerator at my discretion to see what’s available. A place I can pull my shoes off and put on my comfy lounge wear and not worry about the outside world for a space of time.

Home is where my children can come without hesitation and know they are in a safe place.

My home is where I can lay my head on my pillow each night and say my prayers without interruption or distraction.

Yes, I’m very thankful to God in Heaven that I have both, a house and a home!

Bible Verse of the Week: Psalm 3:5
I laid down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.

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

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📜 KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS
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The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

The Cherokee called it the Long Island of the Holston.

That's not a tourism slogan. That's a land deed written in memory. A mile and a half of island sitting in the middle of a river, thick with sycamores and cane, where Cherokee, Creek, and Catawba came to talk instead of fight. Neutral ground. Sacred, in the practical sense of the word.

Then the white settlers showed up.

Sullivan County sits in the northeast corner of Tennessee where the forks of the Holston come together. It's wedge-shaped, 413 square miles of river bottom and ridge, and it has been the crossroads of somewhere since before maps existed.

Good soil. Fresh water. Ridges high enough for timber.

People have always known what this place was worth.

By 1779, there were enough settlers to make it official. They named the county for General John Sullivan, who had earned his reputation by burning Iroquois villages up in New York. That was the frontier's idea of an honor.

Sullivan County threw in with the short-lived State of Franklin a few years later, when the settlers got tired of North Carolina pretending they didn't exist. John Sevier ran things out of nearby Jonesborough. It lasted four years before the whole experiment folded and Tennessee sorted itself out.

After that, the real story begins.

Other mountain counties stayed stuck — subsistence farming, timber cutting, scraping by. Sullivan County caught the industrial wave while other places were still watching the river go past. Iron furnaces. Glass works. Tanneries. Then the railroad followed the valleys in, and the whole equation changed.

In 1909, a group of investors bought 12,000 acres in the bend of the Holston and decided to build a city from scratch. Laid out streets in curves instead of grids. Hired planners. Had the audacity to call it Kingsport before there was much of a Kingsport to speak of.

World War I showed up right on cue.

Demand for chemicals, explosives, dyes. Eastman Chemical built its first plant in 1920. By the 1940s, Kingsport was quietly producing materials that ended up at Oak Ridge — the secret city had a secret supplier an hour up the road. Workers showed up, kept their mouths shut, and drew a paycheck.

Sullivan County stayed busy through decades that emptied out half of Appalachia.

Then there's Bristol.

Half Tennessee. Half Virginia. State Street runs right down the middle of it — the state line stitched into the asphalt like a seam that never quite healed. You can be in Tennessee, take three steps, and be in Virginia. I've known people who thought that was the funniest thing in the world and people who found it genuinely confusing.

In 1927, a man named Ralph Peer dragged recording equipment into a warehouse on that street and caught lightning in a jar. A week of sessions. Jimmie Rodgers. The Carter Family. The whole DNA of country music laid down on wax in a border town that most people had never heard of.

Nashville got the industry. Bristol kept the origin story. It calls itself the Birthplace of Country Music and has the receipts to prove it.

Sullivan County today runs on chemistry and memory. Eastman Chemical still anchors Kingsport, though the workforce has thinned from its peak. Bristol Motor Speedway brings NASCAR twice a year and fills every hotel room within fifty miles of the place.

The Long Island is still out there in the Holston, smaller now since the TVA dams rearranged things. You can walk out to it in low water. Stand where the councils met. The sycamores are long gone.

But the land remembers who came first, and what they understood about a place worth fighting over.

Three famous natives:

1. Doyle Lawson — Born in Ford Town, an unincorporated community in Sullivan County near Kingsport, Lawson grew up steeped in the gospel music of his family. He became one of the great mandolin players in bluegrass history, earning six Grammy nominations and landing in the IBMA Hall of Fame in 2012. If you've ever heard tight three-part harmony float out of a church parking lot on a Sunday morning, Doyle Lawson is part of the reason that sound exists.

2. Besse Cooper — Born in 1896, she was recognized at one point as the world's oldest living person, living all the way to 2012. Sullivan County produced a woman who outlasted just about everyone on the planet. That's not nothing.

3. Austin Augustus King — A lawyer and politician born in 1802, he became the tenth governor of Missouri and later served as a U.S. congressman. Left Sullivan County, went west, and ran a state. Classic Appalachian export story — the mountains produce them, everywhere else gets to keep them.

Come see your neighbors.

Know Your Appalachian Neighbors appears weekly in The Wayne Train.

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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Sun comes up at 6:19 a.m. and goes down at 8:48 p.m. That's nearly fourteen and a half hours of daylight. Not that you needed to be told. Your back already knows.

We're four weeks out from the summer solstice. The days are still stretching. You can feel it in the evenings — that particular quality of late-May light that lingers past supper like a guest who won't go home. Not complaining. Not yet.

The moon tonight is a Waxing Gibbous at 57% — more than half lit, headed somewhere. Old-timers called this the climbing moon. It's not full yet, but it's working on it.

May ends with a Blue Moon — a second full moon in the same calendar month, arriving on the 31st. Two full moons in one month. The mountains will have opinions about that.

Moon's waxing, so the old Appalachian rule is simple: get those above-ground crops in.

Beans, peas, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, greens — these go in when the moon is waxing and getting bigger. The logic being that the same pull moving ocean water around can coax moisture up through the soil and nudge a seed toward the light.

The tradition came to the mountains largely through German settlers, who brought with them a long history of planting by astrological omens and almanac cycles. Felt right to mountain people. Still does.

Ramps are done. Their leaves die back as the tree canopy closes, which makes late April and early May peak season. If you missed them, you missed them. Mark your calendar for next year.

Elderflowers, though — those creamy white clusters are blooming right now, right on the edge of late spring and early summer. They won't last long. If you know a hedgerow or a low, damp spot along a fence line, go look. Elderflower fritters. Elderflower cordial. You have maybe two weeks before they're gone.

Creasy greens fried in fatback, with a side of pinto beans and cornbread cooked in cast iron.

May is the last good month for wild greens before the heat turns them bitter. Creasy greens — what fancy people call upland cress — are still out there on the hillsides if you know where to look. Wilt them in a hot skillet with some fatback and a splash of apple cider vinegar. Don't overthink it. Your grandmother didn't. Some folks who are not familiar with this wild salad starter might confuse “creasy greens” with “greasy beans,” but though they sound alike, they sit pretty far apart on the botanical scale.

The pinto beans are just good sense. The cornbread is non-negotiable.

24.

The number of the day, and the number of hours between now and whatever you've been putting off.

Pick one thing. Do it before dark.

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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