When I was fourteen my family went on vacation to Tennessee.<\/p>\n
My mom had a rule. Vacations were not strictly for pleasure. We went to King’s Dominion outside Richmond one day, we went to visit the Virginia Capitol the other day. We went to Nags Head one day, we took a tour of an historic plantation (which was, frankly, shitty) the other day.<\/p>\n
Tennessee was like that.<\/p>\n
We went to Oak Ridge and toured the nuclear museum. We drove through Knoxville and saw where the World’s Fair had been. And we went to Dollywood in Pigeon Forge.<\/p>\n
I don’t remember a lot of Dollywood; fourteen was a long<\/i> time ago. I think I remember a wooden roller coaster. I think it drizzled in the afternoon.<\/p>\n
We — my family, parents and siblings — got an olde timey photograph taken. We dressed in Old West costumes and sat for a photograph that was printed gold, not unlike an old daguerreotype. I’ve not seen this photo in years, but I know it’s somewhere. My mom tresured it; it used to sit on a desktop with other family photoes. I even think I remember the frame it was in.<\/p>\n
Last summer I was Ollie’s Bargain Outlet one day, and I saw Erin Browne’s The Unofficial Dollywood Cookbook<\/a><\/i>. I picked it up, intending to give it to my mom, maybe for Christmas. It then slipped my mind, and I bought an Amish Christmas cookbook as well in the fall.<\/p>\n My mom died in December, and I gave her neither cookbook. I ended up giving the Amish cookbook to my sister, and the Dollywood cookbook so completely slipped my mind that I didn’t even notice it again until late January or early February. The grief hit me again when I saw it and remembered.<\/p>\n Grief is like that.<\/p>\n Dolly Parton died today<\/a>, aged 80.<\/p>\n I’m not going to say I ever gave Dolly Parton a lot of thought. I didn’t listen to her music, I’m only aware of a handful of songs, I probably knew her best for a stupid calculator joke I learned on the school bus in second grade and didn’t understand, and that’s okay.<\/p>\n I went looking for the Dollywood cookbook this afternoon. I couldn’t find it on my cookbook shelves — yes, plural<\/i> — and wondered what I’d done with it. It was<\/i> on the shelves; I just couldn’t read.<\/p>\n My mom would have had thoughts on Dolly Parton the next time I called her. I would have mentioned the cookbook, maybe asked if she’d tried anything from it. Probably not, probably not. But she’d have said something about Dolly Parton’s book program, and she’d have talked about the trip to Pigeon Forge and Dollywood back in 1987, and those are the things that matter.<\/p>\n Thanks for the memories, Dolly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was fourteen my family went on vacation to Tennessee. My mom had a rule. Vacations were not strictly for pleasure. We went to King’s Dominion outside Richmond one day, we went to visit the Virginia Capitol the other day. We went to Nags Head one day, we took a tour of an historicContinue reading “Dolly Parton”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[5470,5471,5472],"class_list":["post-35480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-dolly-parton","tag-dollywood","tag-tennessee","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}