Running on Red Dog Road Quotes

“Some things thrive if you take them way off and transplant them.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood

“Fourth avenue was a red dog road. Red dog is burned out trash coal. If the coal had too much slate, it was piled in a slag heap and burned. The coal burned up, but the slate didn't The heat turned it every shade of red and orange and lavender you could imagine. When the red on our road got buried under rutted dirt or mud, dump trucks would pour new loads of the sharp-edged rock. My best friend Sissy and I followed along after the truck, looking for fossils. We found ferns and shells and snails, and once I found a perfect imprint of a four-leaf clover.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood

“Grandma saw our red dog road as a place where I might fall down and get hurt.

But I knew if I did, I'd get back up.

And that red dog road would lead me to every place I would ever go in my lifetime.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood

“Grandma saw our red dog road as a place where I might fall down and get hurt.

But I knew if I did I'd get back up.

And that red dog road would lead me to every place I would ever go in my lifetime.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood

“Over the next several years, doctors, specialists in hearing, tested my brother and fitted him with hearing aids, bulky black boxes that strapped to his chest with ugly wires running to earpieces that hurt his tender ears and didn't help him hear even the loudest sound. He was stone deaf and no hearing aid would ever help. But they sold the useless things to my mother anyway, one after the other, always a newer better one, and for high prices. Of course, it was really hope she was paying for, and sometimes hope comes in a black box with a high price.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood

“The shirts on the line flung empty arms into the wind until the rigor mortis of the starch set in. Off to one side, Grandpa's khaki workpants did a stiff-kneed country jig, one knee up then down, up then down, then kick way out.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood

“blackout.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood

“He taught me that the places and people we come from sear into our very being and follow us all the days of our lives. That faith and family twine around our limbs like grapevines. That they are the ties that bind.”
― Drema Hall Berkheimer, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood