This Appalachia Life: My Mother Wasn't Trash

[bucolic_frolic]

5. Salute for your perspective

I seem to recall reading somewhere that "Appalachia" extends beyond the geophysical area,
or the coal mining industry, or whatever other boundaries one chooses to draw. Pockets of
rural poverty are sprinkled across Pennsylvania, upper New York state, and into New England,
and surely west, southwest of West Virginia. I've seen small areas where the housing is from
the 1930s, but the 60s and 80s housing that descendants built adjacent to their parents and
grandparents homes are not huge improvements. Families still struggle with an old pickup, a
seasonal factory or service sector job, nutritional challenges, and barely enough income to
keep a lifestyle going. For that matter, I took an alternative route one day, and found myself
in what must have been a 1950s or a 1930s suburban development. Most homes seemed occupied,
the grass was cut, but money had not been spent on maintenance anywhere. The homes needed
paint, the roofs (hoof - hooves, roof - roofs ain't the English language fun) were moss covered
or stained, the streets probably not paved since 1965, but patched with spatula feathered tar.
So it can happen anywhere.