Throughstone #8: Talking Country - It’s Dialect(ic)

I was in the hotel fitness center doing what all guests do–peering out at the gorgeous Green Mountains while privately jamming out to the Midwest grain report and then the Texas cattle feeder report. Head bobbing to the intense rise and fall of commodities markets and farmers thumping their heads against combine windows and feedlot fences, I scrolled to the Back Forty to hear Will’s take on how the Beltway Madness is translating into diner talk in the Heartland. Not good. Rural America doesn’t deserve the pain of FAFO, but the FA is done and FO is coming in hot. Somehow, farmers and their socioeconomic kinfolk lost their way and traded their own historic brand of progressivism for the snake oil of populism. 

With wailing laments of sad cowboys and lonely combine drivers escorting me down the hallway to the conference ballroom, I grabbed my coffee and tucked away the earbuds to dive into the annual Vermont Farm to Plate Gathering. Suddenly, the term “commodities” was being uttered in a much different way, since you don’t find many commodities out in the fields of our state, except for dairy. Instead, the imported versions fill our (old-fashioned) grocery shelves, so the word is pronounced with a different tone among New England locavores. 

While savoring the variances in dialect, I was deeply unsettled by the dialectic challenges we face.  How will we ever create common cause among our diverse and polarized rural communities? Probably through our historic rural disdain for “The Man.”

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Thoughts?? Your wisdom is appreciated in the "Comments" box below!

“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-daily reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.

250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku. 

Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.

More free-ranging rambles here, if you’re so inclined: https://www.freerangeprof.com/blog