Stick-Shifts, Bluegills and Dancing (2004)

FEATURED AUTHOR—SILAS HOUSE Stick-Shifts, Bluegills and Dancing________ Teresa Ann Gabbard House I FIRST MET SILAS IN 1988 WHEN HE WAS SEVENTEEN years old and I was eighteen. We worked together at Western Steer Steakhouse in Corbin. Silas worked in the kitchen as a cook, and I was a waitress, so we were working together the entire time—me griping at him because my orders were taking so long, and him griping at me because it was taking me so long to get my orders out. He says that I first really caught his attention one day while I was taking a break in the dingy little cubicle that served as our break room. What struck his fancy was that I was reading a Lee Smith book, Black Mountain Breakdown, which was one of his favorite novels, so he knew he had to ask me out since I obviously had good taste. Back then, dates mostly consisted of riding around town and talking. I was different from most of the girls Silas knew because I was much more independent. When we decided on our first date, I think he was pretty shocked—but also impressed—because I insisted on driving. He also liked the fact that I drove a little pickup truck. A stick-shift, no less. He climbed in, and I took off fast, knowing that he would like the kind of girl who drove fast and took chances. And I turned on my tape player. It was playing the first album that Alison Krauss ever put out. This was when no one knew who she was. Even Silas hadn't heard of her. When asked about how we met, that's what he always mentions: Lee Smith and Alison Krauss. It seems to me that we were too very individual people in a world where that really set you aside, and this drew us together. Our dates consisted of long talks about the world and our plans for the future and all those things that teenagers think about obsessively, but we were more assured than most people we knew. We knew what we wanted, and the main thing we agreed on was that family was the most important thing in life. Sure, we had dreams of changing the world through our careers and all that, but more than anything we wanted what our families had given us: a safe and comfortable place to call home. We were also very proud of where we came from and never made any apologies for that. On the contrary, we celebrated being from Appalachia. Our honeymoon wasn't spent on a cruise or at the beach or any of the usual 16 places. Instead, we went to the Blue Heron Coal Mine Camp in Stearns, Kentucky, and we both loved it there. We also both loved to dance, which we did all the time. When Clay and Alma dance at the Hilltop Club in Clay's Quilt, that's really Silas and me. We spent most of our dates at Cumberland Falls, which is one of his favorite places, and I like to think that he was thinking of me when he wrote the scene where Saul proposes to Vine at the waterfall in A Parchment of Leaves. But what I love most about that book is a scene where Vine is watching her daughter, Birdie, go out into a field of wildflowers. In that scene, Birdie pauses for just a minute and looks back at Vine, and Vine knows that she is meant to take this moment and remember it forever. Silas likes to read that scene a lot when he's on the road because of the girls, and I like to hear it, but it always makes me shed a tear. I can just see him playing with the girls up on the hill and one of them looking back at him. That scene really captures what it's like to be a parent. Those who know Silas, know he is a daddy, first and foremost. The girls cry when he leaves, and he cries, too. In his new book there's a scene where one of the...