I grew up in Saltville, Virginia, a tiny Appalachian valley town. As a mining hub specializing in coal and sheet rock, it wasn’t the thriving metropolis you might expect. But I was determined to live a dignified, elite lifestyle regardless of my locale.
We lived in an old brick farmhouse, which really was a gem, on about forty rolling acres of Apalachain foothills. I liked to pretend that my family was royalty, not in the usual manner of imagining, but rather in the sense that I wanted everyone in town to believe we were royalty. I would rifle through my mom’s lingere drawer and pick out my favorite princess frock, an emerald green silk neglige, and pick out something similar for my mom, who for some unexplainable reason refused to indulge me. All I wanted was to hang triangular construction paper flags from the turrets of our antebellum farmstead and frolic around in the front yard with my mother, both of us donning her fanciest lingere. If passers-by could just see the flags, see our outfits, they would have to believe we were royal.
My mom was a school teacher and my dad was a preacher, so you can imagine how classy our life really was. One afternoon, a parent of one of the kids I knew from school came to see my mom on some sort of school business. I came to the door where they were talking and said, in my primmest, most proper voice, “Excuse me, Mother, shall I dress for dinner now?” Surely the boy’s mom would return home telling of the lavish, sophisticated life we lived, dressing for dinner.
These are just a few examples of what I wanted the residents of Saltville to believe about me. I was really into horses, and when I was eight I started going to an upscale summer camp with an excellent riding program. The other campers’ lifestyles seemed to be significantly more luxurious than mine. No need to admit that I came from a coal mining town, though–they didn’t know me–I would make up my own story as I went.
From my bunk, I kept my cabin-mates on the edges of their seats with my elaborate descriptions of my fancy mansion and, for added awe-inspiring effect, its clap-controlled lights.
At the barn, though, that’s where I really pulled out all the stops. I told them of the hours I spent on my endless acres of upscale horse farm, which really meant that I occasionally spent the afternoon sanding rust off of my friend’s ragged-ass livestock trailer or raking the cockle burrs from my twenty-year-old nag’s ratty tail. I told them about Dixie, the three time English Pleasure champion Arabian mare my parents bought from some Sheik in Arabia itself. This really meant, of course, that I had a pretty little bay Arabian we bought for fifteen hundred dollars; her owners had no use for her because she was no good at barrel racing or pole bending. And her three championships? That was the Beginners in English Pleasure class we entered at the Rich Valley Fair, our only opponent some incompetent child flailing about on top of an arthritic pinto pony. I showed them the pictures of us winning, in my dignified tweed English Pleasure habit. What they couldn’t see in the photo were the Justin roper boots with the fringe on the toes under my classy polyester pants, the essential footwear of Saltville’s redneck equine sector.
I had these people in the palm of my hand. Daily they begged for more anecdotes from my decadent home life, and I rattled off lie after lie of the life I had created.
After three weeks I was home again, throwing a Western saddle over my three-time English Pleasure champion’s back, and riding through deserted tobacco fields, counting down the days until next summer, when I could reinvent myself again. I returned nearly each summer for thirteen years, recreating my life a little, tweaking the details, until I finally felt confident in exactly who I was.
