Practicing The Appalachian Value Of Neighborliness And Hospitality

Over the last several days I have practiced and seen others of my neighbors practicing the core Appalachian Value of Neighborliness and Hospitality.  I have written about this key Appalachian Value on more than one occasion.  Just two days ago, I wrote a blog post about an eighty year old neighbor of mine whom I had never met until very recently who manifests this value on a daily basis and did so with my wife and I although we were not much more than strangers.  A little more than five years ago, I wrote about another occasion when relative strangers in an adjoining county had invited my wife and I into a family gathering and fed us a hot meal cooked on a wood stove in a former country store. I have had the pleasure of being invited into a relatively poor and shabby four room mountain home near Big Creek, West Virginia, where I was fed a fine meal of fried chicken, biscuits, and potatoes by people who were obviously at least as poor as I.  In a coal camp in Boone County West Virginia in the 1980's,  I was invited in, as a total stranger, to a family party being held for the final birthday of an eighty year old man who had been sent home from the hospital to spend his last days with family. I have spent several nights in the homes of practitioners of minority religion in Tennessee and North Carolina when I was researching that subject.

Roger D. Hicks and Loyal Jones Photo by Candice Hicks

I also wrote about Neighborliness and Hospitality in a response to a Loyal Jones manuscript in which he discussed that particular Appalachian Value by saying that "...we have become less trustful of strangers...our manners and customs have changed, so that we may only invite friends and neighbors we already know to meet for a meal."  He also mentions the increase of crime across the region as a factor in these changes.  Loyal Jones is absolutely correct in these statements.  The widespread drug epidemic and related crime wave across Appalachia has made us all afraid, to one degree or another, of anyone we don't know or who might appear to possibly be under the influence of any drug or alcohol.  Home invasions, robberies, burglaries, kidnappings, child murders, and all categories of violent crime are more common in the rural areas of Appalachia today than they were when "Appalachian Values" was first published forty years ago.  It is far worse than it was even 25 years ago when I was working as a door to door salesman in Southern West Virginia and South Eastern Kentucky. In the late 1980's when I was a salesman, I was regularly invited to eat meals in the homes of total strangers in the region. Two of my most precious memories involve such meals as I have cited above. I cannot imagine what it would be like to spend a day knocking on doors in those regions today, meeting total strangers in their homes, and attempting to gain entrance to those homes to conduct a sales presentation.  That would be a tough proposition today even if one was working on what are known as qualified leads, calls to people who want to see your product and know you are coming or to whom you have been referred by family or friends.

But I must take umbrage with at least part of that paragraph immediately above.  While the statements it contains are true, there are still daily practitioners of Neighborliness and Hospitality living all across Central and Southern Appalachia.  We may be harder to find sometimes.  We may be practicing those values with a more skeptical eye on the recipients of our largess but we are still providing food and rides to strangers at times.  We are still coming to the assistance of neighbors in need.  We are still donating to important charitable causes.  We are still practicing our kindnesses as our ancestors did even though we might not be quite so open about it in these broadly troubling times.

My own practice of these values came about in the last few days because I have some neighbors who are quite elderly and one of them is suffering from dementia while being cared for by a spouse who is 88 years old.  Another just lost their spouse at 90 after having cared for them for more than five years at an age when most people are either dead or in a nursing home.  The neighbor with dementia frequently falls and the spouse calls me to come and pick them up which I have done numerous times over the last year or so.  I also regularly check on the widowed neighbor because they have no children, still live alone, and seem to suffer from lack of social involvement other than a regular Sunday drive to church.  This person is remarkable in that they are living alone without any real concerns other than advanced age.  Their mental functioning is probably as good or better than mine with a 23 year age difference.  In fact they took a trip with a nephew more than thirty miles to another town to buy a new car just a few days ago.  I would also insist that there is nothing exceptional, unusual, or particularly exemplary in what I do for these neighbors.  It is the Appalachian way.  It is a core Appalachian Value.  It was totally commonplace in all of Central and Southern Appalachia just a couple of decades ago.  I sincerely hope that it becomes commonplace again.  Sadly, whether or not that happens may well depend on how we deal with the ongoing opioid epidemic.  I would say, in conclusion to all my readers, that we must work individually and collectively to reinforce, maintain, and preserve all these core values.  But most especially, we must work to be hospitable, neighborly, helpful, and caring about the people and the greater community around us.  It may well be what saves us all from a steady, inexorable deterioration in a community which is peopled by strangers who don't know each other, don't exhibit love for our country, and don't work to make the world a better place as our ancestors always did.