Edwards Custom Cuts SC

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🎂🎈Update 🎈🎂
Lili appreciates everyone’s kind words and birthday wishes! She had a fantastic day!!!

Lil’ Boss is celebrating her 14th Birthday today!!! We’re here til 12 then we got some partying to do!!!🎉🎂🎈🥳

💈UPDATE💈
We will resume normal business hours tomorrow. Friday, September 11th. Sorry for any inconvenience.

We’ve apparently sprung a leak and won’t be open today for sure. The entire waiting room is flooded. Sorry for any inconvenience, hopefully we can reopen tomorrow but that’s inconclusive at the moment

On this day in 2015 I happened to be driving by as a crew was taking down this Planet Hollywood sign at Broadway at the Beach. The location had been open for nearly 19 years, but Planet Hollywood chose not to renew its lease and closed right after Labor Day.

WHAT A HOLLER IS

People who ain’t from Appalachia sometimes ask, “What exactly is a holler?”

Well, the easiest way I know to explain it is this:

A holler is sort of like a subdivision in the city.

Only nobody planned it.

There wasn’t a developer who came through and measured off lots, poured sidewalks, planted matching little trees, and named the streets something fancy like Whispering Pines Estates.

A holler just happened.

A creek ran between two mountains, somebody found a flat enough piece of ground to build a house on, then their brother built one farther up, Mamaw and Papaw lived across the creek, an uncle put a trailer on the hill, a cousin built down by the road, and before long there was a whole little world tucked back in there.

That’s a holler.

And every holler has its own personality.

Some are quiet.

Some are rough.

Some are poor.

Some have money now but still carry the ways of people who didn’t.

Some are full of old families whose names have been connected to that piece of ground longer than anybody can remember.

And some hollers?

Listen.

I was raised in Appalachia, and there are still a few hollers I wouldn’t go easing up into after dark unless somebody back there was expecting me.

Every mountain person reading this knows exactly what I mean.

Because sometimes you can turn off the main road, drive a mile or two, lose cell service, cross a little bridge, pass three dogs standing in the road, and suddenly realize you have entered a place where Google Maps has absolutely no authority.

And somewhere along the way, somebody is liable to look at you and say:

“You ain’t from around here, are you?”

That sentence can mean several things.

Sometimes it means welcome.

Sometimes it means curiosity.

Sometimes it means somebody noticed your license plate.

And sometimes it means you ought to smile, be polite, and remember which direction you came from.

Holler people have always been watchers.

We notice unfamiliar cars.

We know who belongs to which house.

We know whose young’un that is.

We know whose truck just went up the road.

We know who moved out, who moved back, who got married, who got divorced, who is sick, whose garden did good, and whose cow got out Wednesday morning.

News travels differently in a holler.

It don’t need Wi-Fi.

A holler raises you different too.

You learn early that money and wealth ain’t necessarily the same thing.

A family might not have had much cash, but they had beans put up in jars, potatoes under the house, corn in the freezer, a smokehouse, a garden, a spring, a woodpile, a sewing machine, cousins close by, and somebody who knew how to fix nearly anything with baling wire, a pocketknife, and determination.

That counted for something.

Still does.

Holler people knew how to make do because making do wasn’t some cute little lifestyle choice.

It was survival.

If your britches tore, somebody patched them.

If your shoes were still wearable, you wore them.

If a washing machine quit, somebody took the back off of it before anybody even considered buying another one.

Coffee cans held nails.

Butter bowls held leftovers.

Feed sacks became something useful.

Old jars were never thrown away because you might need them come canning time.

Nothing got wasted until every bit of usefulness had been wrung out of it.

And sometimes there just wasn’t enough.

That is part of the story too.

People like to romanticize mountain poverty nowadays.

There wasn’t anything romantic about a hungry child.

There wasn’t anything charming about a coal bucket running low in January, a roof leaking, or parents lying awake wondering where grocery money was coming from.

Some people in these mountains truly did without.

They wore hand-me-downs that had already been handed down three times.

They ate what the garden made.

They stretched gravy farther than gravy ought to stretch.

They knew exactly how many biscuits were left and how many mouths still needed one.

But somehow, even in houses where there wasn’t much, somebody could usually find enough for company.

That tells you something about holler people.

You might walk into a house that didn’t have two nickels rubbing together and still hear:

“You hungry?”

That was love.

Love in the holler was not always spoken.

Sometimes nobody in the family was good at saying “I love you.”

But Papaw kept your car running.

Mamaw sent you home with green beans.

Your uncle showed up with a chainsaw after a storm.

Your neighbor brought soup when somebody died.

Somebody sat with your sick mama while you slept.

Somebody slipped twenty dollars into your hand and told you not to mention it.

That was “I love you.”

Holler people can be hard people.

They had to be.

There wasn’t always anybody coming to rescue you.

If the creek flooded, neighbors came.

If a tree fell, men showed up with saws.

If somebody’s house burned, clothes started appearing on their porch before the ashes cooled.

If there was a death, women started cooking.

That’s how it worked.

And you were raised knowing that someday it would be your turn to show up for somebody else.

Children raised in hollers learned things without anybody sitting them down and calling it a lesson.

You learned to stay out of grown folks’ conversations.

You learned not to waste food.

You learned to respect old people.

You learned that when a funeral procession came through, you stopped.

You learned that somebody else’s property was somebody else’s property.

You learned how to entertain yourself with a creek, a bicycle, a stick, a dog, and absolutely no supervision that would be considered acceptable today.

You learned what poison ivy looked like.

You learned which neighbor’s dog would bite.

You learned where the blackberry patch was.

You learned that when somebody hollered your whole name from the porch, your freedom had officially expired.

And you learned something else.

You represented your people.

Your behavior didn’t belong only to you.

People knew who raised you.

Act a fool somewhere and before you got home somebody had probably already called your mama.

That little holler could feel mighty small then.

But when life got bad, that same smallness could wrap around you like a quilt.

Because people knew you.

Not your profile.

Not your job title.

Not what you owned.

You.

They remembered you barefoot.

They remembered your daddy when he had hair.

They remembered your mama before she was your mama.

They knew your grandparents.

Sometimes they knew stories about your family you wished they’d forget.

You belonged to a place.

There’s power in belonging somewhere.

That doesn’t mean hollers were perfect.

Lord, no.

Some families fought.

Some grudges lasted generations.

Some people could stay mad longer than most civilizations stay in existence.

There were secrets.

There was drinking.

There was violence.

There was addiction.

There were mean people, broken people, generous people, holy people, funny people, and people you learned very early not to fool with.

A holler is not a fairy tale.

It is a human place.

And human places contain both kindness and trouble.

But underneath it all was a kind of toughness that came from generations of people learning how to survive on ground that was beautiful but seldom easy.

Mountain land will teach you something.

It teaches you that flat places are precious.

That winter has consequences.

That water can give life and take it.

That gardens require work.

That nothing stays fixed forever.

That sometimes you have to do without until you can do better.

And maybe that’s why holler people developed a certain way about them.

We improvise.

We endure.

We laugh at things that probably aren’t funny because sometimes laughing is cheaper than therapy.

We save things.

We feed people.

We remember.

We can be suspicious of outsiders.

We can be fiercely protective of our own.

And yes, sometimes somebody new will come wandering deep into the mountains, looking around like they just discovered us, and sooner or later one of us is going to ask:

“You ain’t from around here, are you?”

Because a holler isn’t just geography.

It’s not simply the low place between two ridges.

It is a little community.

A collection of stories.

A network of kin.

A childhood.

A cemetery on the hill.

A creek that has carried a thousand summers away.

A road everybody complains about but nobody wants widened.

A porch light burning for somebody coming home late.

It is patched clothes and full supper tables.

It is hand-me-downs and hand-ups.

It is knowing how to do without without believing you are less than anybody else.

Some of the poorest people I ever knew were among the richest.

They owned almost nothing the world would have been impressed by.

But they had gardens.

Family.

Faith.

Neighbors.

Stories.

Land.

Music.

Laughter.

And people who would come running when they called.

You can have a whole lot of money and never have that.

So what is a holler?

Maybe it is Appalachia in miniature.

Hard and beautiful.

Poor and rich.

Suspicious and welcoming.

Quiet one minute and full of somebody yelling for a loose dog the next.

It is a place that teaches you to stretch what you have, fix what you can, endure what you must, help when you’re able, and never throw away a perfectly good butter bowl.

And if you were raised in one, no matter how far away you ever go, some little piece of you stays there.

Back past the last streetlight.

Across the creek.

Up where the road narrows.

In that little fold between the mountains where somebody still remembers exactly whose young’un you are.

~banjo~

For nearly 300 years, this cannon rested beneath the sea — until divers brought it back from the wreck of one of history’s most infamous pirate ships.

The cannon was recovered from the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard, who terrorized the Atlantic coast in the early 18th century. The ship was originally a French vessel called La Concorde, before Blackbeard captured it and transformed it into a heavily armed pirate warship.

In 1718, the Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground on a sandbar near Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. Only months later, Blackbeard — whose real name was likely Edward Teach or Edward Thatch — was killed in battle by Lieutenant Robert Maynard and his men.

The wreck was rediscovered in 1996, and since then, archaeologists have recovered hundreds of thousands of artifacts from the site, including anchors, weapons, medical tools, ship fittings, and multiple cannons.

This photo, taken in October 2013, shows one of those cannons being raised from the water during a recovery operation involving the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Smilax.

It was not just a piece of metal.
It was a weapon from the age of piracy.

A cannon from Blackbeard’s lost flagship — lifted from the sea after nearly three centuries in silence.