Ah, Whiskey Moods, I love my Sierras. By the time you get up Mount Whitney, your lungs are screaming for air. In California, the valley between our mountains was 4,500 feet and I lived another 1,000 feet higher up the mountain. From my balcony, I could see across the Mojave all the way to the horizon. Here in Kentucky, the highest mountain peak is a cute little 4,145 feet. They call valleys hollers here, and that makes sense to me.

I love mountain music – bluegrass, folk music and ballads – and luthiers with an eye for wood, a hand for coaching it into music and players who play the night and every kind of ache away. I can’t sing, but I can cook and musicians love to eat. I will forever miss jam sessions in the forest. The music, the wind whistling through the pines, the fall of water, the twittering birds, the whoosh of owls – just isn’t anything else like it.

People build cities, but mountains build people. I think that’s the reason mountain people are pretty much the same everywhere I’ve gone. John Denver said it all with two words: Mountain Mama.

My daughter married a Kentucky man with an enormous family. Some of these women gave their kids as many as 15 siblings. I will never ask if they breast fed. At one of their gatherings, I mentioned a podcast I’d listened to and discovered everyone knew, or was related to, someone in the Cornbread Mafia. I love swapping stories and so do they. We got the family facts and the facts and when they don’t match, put your money on the family facts.

Thank you for Wagon Wheel. I do love that song. I can't see without my glasses, so I don't photograph anything anymore. But I will see what I can do about photos.