“Leatherwood Holler,” he told me.

“Right,” I answered. Leatherwood Holler—our destination for a Christmas Eve meal with his family; a family that will eventually become my own.

“It’s about half an hour from the house,” he told me. That didn’t surprise me. Everything is at least half an hour from his house.

Four days shy of our tenth-month-of-dating-anniversary, I went to see Chad’s momma’s family in a holler, deep in Claiborne County. With no vehicle of my own, my parents had to drop me off at their home and retrieve me after dinner. Chad was the only one home when I got there, his parents and brother had gone to the barn to feed the cows. Rain began sprinkling down. “See you at 9!” I told my parents. I followed Chad into the house, leaving Christmas cookies and a Christmas card on the counter. The two weeks since we’d said our holiday goodbyes seemed like years. “They’ll like you, Beth,” he promised me.

I was nervous. Since we’d started dating, I’d only talked to his parents a few times. Meeting some extended family was a big deal. I wasn’t all that worried about liking them. However, I was having a hard time winning his parents over. What about his mother’s siblings?

“Howdy-howdy,” his mother told me as she came through the door.

“Hey,” I answered. “How are ya today?”

“Just fine. Been feedin’ my cows.”

Chad’s father sat down at the woodstove to rekindle the fire. “Let it go out, didn’t ya, son?” his dad asked. The word “fire” came out as “farur”.

Chad rolled his eyes a little. “It ain’t cold in here.”

Their accents made me smile and made mine come through even worse. Chad and I were raised in the hills of Tennessee. Being from Ohio, my mother didn’t have the accent, so mine wasn’t always so evident. Chad’s parents are country people and speak as such.

Chad’s brother, sixteen-year-old Robert, came through the door a few moments later. “Hey, Robert!” I said as he walked toward his room. He didn’t reply. He didn’t speak to me much.

“Well. That was rude,” Chad commented.

From the kitchen, I heard his mother say, “I told ’im to behave hisself, so he ain’t sayin’ a word.” A few minutes passed. “It’s not that I’m not sociable. I’m just cleanin’ up a little.”

“You’re fine,” I told her, smiling. “Just take your time.”

Not long after, we were on our way to Leatherwood Holler. The five of us piled into the minivan. Chad’s father was in the driver’s seat, his mother in the back, Robert in the passenger seat, and Chad and I in the middle two seats of the van. Slowly, his dad drove the vehicle back towards the main highway, but soon veered left down a road off of a dead man’s turn.

“Go around by the church house, Dad,” Chad told him. “It’s made of logs,” he said to me.

We turned left, then right and later on down the road, left again.

“I was raised out here,” his mother told me. “I’ll show ya.”

“My aunt Edna lives in the house that Momma grew up in,” Chad added.

We weaved our way deep into the hills of Claiborne County. The road narrowed and grew more winding with each minute. I laughed at the people who kept their cows on the hills surrounding the hollers we drove through. It was as if I had stepped back into a different generation, a different time. Power lines were the only evidence of civilization here. Cable and satellite TV didn’t reach that far into the hills.

About twenty minutes into our drive, we came to the church house and it took my breath away. Not because of its fancy architecture or flashy stained glass windows, but because it represented something timeless and of great value. Built in the late 1800s, Leatherwood Baptist Church was a simple one-room log building with a fellowship hall added later as a separate structure. Looking at it, I could imagine the generations of people in the holler who had worshiped there, been married there, baptized there and been laid to rest from there. Here, I thought, was the link between past and present. The church has stood strong through good times and bad over the years—and so had its families, Chad’s among them. Services were still held there regularly and always drew a crowd so big that it overflowed the church.

Soon, Chad’s dad pointed to a house way up on the hill. “That’s where we’re headed.”

“Oh, really?” I laughed as the road suddenly turned right and started up the side of the hill. As it turned out, they weren’t kidding.

Chad and I got out and walked the rest of the way up the hill while his father parked the van. An aunt of venerable age motioned us into the house. Because Chad’s mother was the baby of the family and in her mid-thirties when she had Chad, her siblings were my grandparents’ age or older.

As Chad and I sat down on the couch and a random uncle asked me, “Where’re ya from?”

“Oneida. It’s a good ways from here. Ever been?”

“Mhmm,” he answered.

I was properly introduced to everybody who arrived—aunts with cigarettes hanging from their mouths, cousins with jaws full of Skoal, second cousins in middle and high school warmly welcomed me to Claiborne County and the family. Chad quietly explained the relations. “Dakota and Cheyenne belong to Sharon and Curtis. Sharon is Edna’s daughter, making her Momma’s niece. Adam and Todd there are still in high school. Trevor over there was in college, pre med, but he got tired of it. Serenity belongs to him.”

I was enthralled—here I was, in the middle of a country Christmas party, privileged to see hardworking people, loving and kind people, at play. To have everybody together was rare and they were still perfectly fine having me there, an outsider in their home, as well.

After a while, grace was said by another cousin wearing a shirt that said, “Jesus died for MYSPACE in heaven.” Everybody jumped up to grab a plate of food from the kitchen and reclaim a seat on any vacant furniture before somebody else did. Food covered the kitchen table. In an adjoining room, another table held almost as much dessert.

After dinner, one of Chad’s first cousins got out the camera and rounded everyone up, taking pictures of this family and that, this aunt of Chad’s and her kids and grandkids, the “married in” aunts and uncles, the “married in” cousins, Chad’s mom and all her siblings.

I thought of all the years of life marked by family photos on an old worn couch in an old worn house. I envisioned family gatherings to come, when I would be included in the pictures and could bring a side dish of my own to add to the dinner. And then I wondered: was I living up to their standards? Did they think me stuck-up for wearing something besides a T-shirt? I remembered my disdain for chewing and smoking tobacco. It was at that moment an aunt with lit cigarette asked, “Does this burn your eyes, honey?”

“No, Ma’am,” I politely lied. My mother raised me better than to tell people they couldn’t smoke in their own house.

Finally, it was decided that the presents could be opened and I watched as they dove into them, hoarding wrapping paper. The minute the last bit of ribbon hit the floor, the annual wrapping paper fight took place. With Chad’s mother cheering me on, I grabbed all I could and joined in.

Not long after that, we said our goodbyes. “They loved you,” Chad assured me in the backseat of the minivan. On the way to his house, we did our usual joking about buying expensive stuff for the place we some day hoped to own. While waiting on my parents to come get me from his house, his dad broke out a copy of the family tree.

“You better make sure no names look familiar!” his mother joked.

When my parents arrived, Chad’s parents followed us outside to greet them. It was a meeting long in the making and the differences were considerable. My parents were fifteen years younger than his; his parents got a bit of a late start. My parents had been out into the world; his had stayed close to home and made a life on the farm. The only thing the four of them had in common was Chad and I and our future together.

On the long drive home to Oneida, my mother laughed to hear the way I pronounced words after spending the evening with Chad’s family.

I smiled to myself; it’s just part of being from the South to speak with an accent, an audible marker of my heritage.

***

I trust Chad when he says that his parents like me. I enjoy their company, and they treat all the in-laws just like family so I know I’ll be afforded the same treatment. No matter what, country people take care of their own, and that’s increasingly important in a world where you can’t rely on much of anything but God above and the family around you.

Who knows where life will take Chad and me in the future. Chad is a year away from a computer science degree and I’m an aspiring author. His degree is marketable almost anywhere and we could probably move wherever we wanted. It almost goes without saying, of course, that we won’t ever have a farm or live anywhere that you can’t get cable or reliable internet service. But regardless of what we do or where we live, we’ll always be just a couple of country people, if not by practice, then by heritage.

In the past, I’ve sometimes been guilty of hiding of my heritage and disguising my accent so I might seem more “intelligent” by society’s standards. I won’t any longer. My accent is part of who I am, and I’ll stand behind it. I’ll learn from family members who have come before me; that’s just how it goes. And wherever we are, we’ll always have the security of knowing that there’s a group of old country people waiting to welcome us into their home whenever we can get ourselves over that way.