High summer is a busy time in the country, whether one lives in the hollers or out on the plains. Aunt Cathy canned tomatoes and green beans, pickled peppers and cucumbers and made black raspberry jam and peach preserves. She started early each day, before it got hot, and planned her projects to be out of the heat of the kitchen by noon. Some mornings she would skip the canning, grab a basket and head for the woods and pastures to gather coltsfoot, mullein, skullcap, pennyroyal, and lobelia to tincture in quart jars with some of the moonshine.   "Doctors are fine," she thought, 'but they cost money, and these herbs help a lot of what might ail me as good as anything the doctor might give me."

She wondered how much the kids would really want to know. Or needed to know, for that matter. All she knew is she wanted THEM to know...and to understand. "People don't think us hillbillies understand anything," she grumped to herself. "They think we don't know nothin'. Fine. Let 'em think that. We have learned from hard experience that it is often best to keep your understanding to yourself. But we understand these hills and hollers and the spirits that dwell therein. We understand the music of the wind in the treetops and in the fiddle and the pipes, and the plain voice raised in song. We know what the voices of the creeks shout or whisper as the water pours down the mountain after gathering from all over the ridge side.

Cassie. Cassie with her second sight. Cassie, the bastard daughter. So completely of this place, this holler, these mountains, but never fitting in. When she fled from here she thought she was free, but she belonged to this place, and eventually it claimed her once again.

At least when she returned, she returned with grace.