In the Blue Ridge Mountains of the 19th century, a rich community thrives as neighbors of Scots and Irish heritage, Cherokee lineage, and New England Puritan stock simmer together in living out their day-to-day lives. At the heart of it all is the dash of salt, Mami Salami, a Melungeon, that mysterious, maligned and little known minority that enriched mountain culture from the shadows.
Merrilee McKay lives in this high country, in a cabin her father built, surrounded by the love of her parents and siblings. She's never heard of electricity but knows when a storm's coming. She's never ridden a bicycle but can harness her pony in five minutes flat. She doesn't know what ice cream is but can pick the ripest persimmons for the best pudding. She's never seen the ocean, but has the Sight-the ability to see things long gone before and yet to come. Her music comes from the wind in the pine trees, the trickling spring, the song of whip-poor-wills and Pa's tenor voice. Cars haven't been invented yet, but Merrilee walks the side of her mountain, ridge to hollow, as surely as the white tail deer and wild turkey, gathering sassafras, scuppernongs, mushrooms and chestnuts. She's never been to school but reads the classics as her ma taught her after supper, in front of the fire. Arithmetic, the word, might stump her, yet she does sums for egg money and converts trees into board feet in her head like magic. She doesn't have any friends nearby she sees regularly, or any other close relatives, but she has Mami Salami, and that makes all the difference.
This story is a remembrance of octogenarian narrator Merrilee McKay Starr of the year she turned fourteen and stepped into the wider world, finding new friends and reuniting with old ones, on a journey that set her life course. The year her life changed forever.
With no seam between magical, mysterious and mundane, from the kitchen table to the moonshine still, through the apple orchard and over the mountain, the stories of Merrilee and the people of this mountain community echo through the years.
About the Author: Joy was raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Surry County, North Carolina, aka Mayberry. She learned to ride and drive from her granddaddy's teams of mules and Belgian mares as they wove through terraced tobacco fields, pulling sleds of Brightleaf to the pack house. From the tenant farmers who worked the land to the dozen towering draft horses, from the hog lot to the hound pens, raucous with baying, howling and razor-sharp yips, these influences on Joy's early years gave her a profound respect and reverence for Mother Nature and the cycle of life as it unfolds in the Blue Ridge.
After a lifetime career in education as Chair of the Creative Writing Department at School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, OH, Doctor Joy devotes her time to her own small farm family on a ridge top in south-eastern Indiana and writes of the mountains she's homesick for every day.
