Life was different in our holler, I came to learn. And we were definitely living in a holler, not a hollow like you might read about in the dictionary or see on a fancy map. Merriam-Webster’s will tell you it’s a small valley or basin. The dictionary can also tell you it’s a depressed or low part of a surface; an unfilled space. But what it can’t tell you is what that means, where the depression becomes visible in the land, what is inhabiting all that unfilled space. Only people who were raised in hollers can do that. A holler is a place where you very likely grew up in spitting distance of a
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