Lovin' God's Green Earth

Did you hear? I got a new job this year, one I’m thrilled to pieces about.

It’s the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and they’ve made me their ambassador.

Don’t look so surprised! I know I don’t seem like much of a nature girl and, okay, I probably won’t be going hiking in my heels anytime soon. But the Smokies…they touch my soul. Let me tell you why.

All that I am comes from those mountains where I was born and raised.

If I close my eyes, I can see the mist on the peaks, the bluebirds on the fencepost, the meadows filled with purple ironweed and wild daisies.

I remember chasing butterflies and hummingbirds and tying June bugs to a string to make what we called ’lectric kites (don’t worry, we released them).

I loved running barefoot in the hills, my feet tender in the spring then brown and tough by summer’s end. Just hearing the word “barefoot” still conjures up a sense of wonder and freedom for me because that’s what I had growing up.

Not that life in the Smokies was easy by today’s standards. I was the fourth of 12 children of a sharecropper and his wife.

It was so cold the day I came into the world that when the kitchen in our one-room cabin was mopped, the water left a film of ice on the floor. The doctor rode up on a horse, and I like to think God guided their steps along the snowy mountain ridge leading to our cabin, much the same way he guides my every step today.

The land Daddy farmed then belonged to an old woman named Martha Williams. We called her Aunt Marth. She had an old spinning wheel that seemed as big as a Ferris wheel, and I’d watch her make yarn. It was magical to me, like spinning dreams out of thin air.

Aunt Marth would put me up on her knee and sing: “Tip toe, tip toe, little Dolly Parton, tip toe, tip toe, ain’t she fine…” I was amazed that she knew a song that had my name in it, never thinking that you could put anybody’s name there.

Later on, Daddy bought us our own place way back in a mountain holler. It was overgrown, the fences were down, the roof leaked, but he worked day and night and made something of it.

I like to joke that we had two rooms and a path and running water—if you were willing to run to get it.

In all seriousness, though, we had everything we needed. I should say, God gave us everything we needed, and almost all of it came right from his good green earth.

Everyone’s into living green now—for good reason—but that was the only way we knew how to live back then in the mountains.