StateoftheOzarks Weekly

A Green Christmas

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BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… A GREEN CHRISTMAS. “A green Christmas makes a full graveyard,” goes the old mountain saying. It is an old Appalachian omen, dating back likely to old Britain. But Vance Randolph recorded the saying in the Ozarks too and the words have echoed in my mind the past several days. Days in which…

StateoftheOzarks Weekly

Mountain Magic

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BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… MOUNTAIN MAGIC. I clench the Arkansas diamond in my small palm, imagining in my five-year-old mind that the clear quartz crystal is a real diamond and, more than that, that the cheap quartz has real magic. I had picked the crystal out of a rock box in a dimly lit mom-and-pop curio…