The light dappled us as we walked through the canopy of poplars and oaks and umbrella magnolias. Later, in camouflage overalls, a long-sleeve button-up shirt, and her heavy snake boots, she was high-stepping through the pathless understory of a hardwood cove, thick with nettles, trillium, Solomon’s seal, jewelweed, and poison ivy, and I followed behind. I waited while she rinsed her head in the water she had hauled from the cold creek that runs along the back of her property. She is in her sixties, white hair to her shoulders, a hunched-over back. When I pulled up, Carol was hanging her head over a washbasin in the yard, soaping her hair, and she yelled hello to me with her eyes closed. So in the warm and swelling early days of June, I drove north into the mountains to see her. In the spring, I looked her up and she said to come when the days got long and things turned green. She told me where she lived and invited me to visit sometime. She had a vitality and sense of good humor about her that made me curious. Carol reminded me of a hobbit, with a round nose and face and big alert eyes. “You like it?” she asked, eyebrows raised, smiling. The cup Carol gave me was how I imagined it would be: simple, but rich, and sweet with the taste of earth. I did, because I had never tried sassafras tea and had recently heard my grandmother reminisce about how her mother would dig up the roots and brew tea from them. She had brought sassafras tea to share with anyone who cared for some.
I met Carol in Knoxville, sixty miles to the south, at a Saturday crafts market in my neighborhood last summer. Thickly forested mountains rise up quick and steep on either side, and cut out of those mountains is hollow after hollow, and more folks live back up in them, where time and light are funny.Ī woman named Carol Judy keeps an isolated home in Tussy Cut hollow and spends her days in the surrounding woods. There’s a road through the valley, tracing the creek, and folks live along it, clustered into unincorporated communities. In East Tennessee, just south of the Kentucky border, Clear Fork Creek carves out a little valley from the Cumberland Plateau.
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