"epilogue"

What is striking about the epilogue is the complete absence of any thoughts of Inman.  He has completely vanished; the only connection to him is "a tall slender girl of nine."

Otherwise, it's a scene of nature's abundance. It is an October tradition with Ada and Ruby to have "a last picnic there before cold weather set in." In contrast to Inman's dream of a home, this is a real home made by the women's combined efforts.  Ruby has married the boy from Georgia and they have three sons. Ruby's father is there with his fiddle, but he also performs the practical task of milking the cow.

I've said Inman is absent from this epilogue, but he is indirectly suggested in the world of art; first in the fiddle tune Strobrod plays and then in the story Ada reads about Baucis and Philemon. The tune is about Bonnie George Campbell who "rode out on a day" and contains the refrain, "home came his good horse but never came he."

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Baucis and Philemon are an old married couple, the only ones in their town to welcome the disguised gods Zeus and Hermes. The couple feed the gods generously, but when they realize they are in the presence of gods, Philemon "thought of catching and killing the goose that guarded their house and making it a meal for the guests." Zeus tells them they do not need to slay the goose, but they should climb the nearby mountain. When they reach the top, they turn around to see that their town has been flooded.

Coming back they see that their house has been turned into an ornate temple. The gods also grant them their wish to stay together forever and that when it came time for one of them to die, the other would die as well.  When they died, they were changed into an intertwining pair of trees as Frazier mentions. [All this is from Wikipedia; don't want you to think I actually knew it.]

Finally, there is the gospel tune, Angel Band, in which "the girl," Inman's daughter, joins in the chorus with Strobrod and sings "bear me away on your snowy wings."  The complete line is "bear me away on your snowy wings to my immortal home."

On that note, I leave you with a version sung by Joan Baez and Jeffrey Shurtleff.  You can listen to it as many times as you want -- as I'm sure many mountain people have.

Since my original video is no longer available, I've provided a new one.