Weekend

I love the variety of my life. It adds to my storytelling daily, because each experience has in it the kernel of a possible story, or an insight to a story I already tell. This weekend is a good example of that.

It started Friday evening on the way home. Soemtimes I'm fortunate enough to be able to carpool with my friend Suzy, also a librarian (actually, the Children's Consultant at the WV Library Commission www.librarycommission.lib.wv.us ). We met my husband in Ripley, enjoyed dinner at the good Mexican restaurant Cozumel, and then went on to a play at the Alpine Theatre (http://www.alpinewv.com/index.html) called The Diary of Adam and Eve (free download of excerpts from the play at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/142) by Mark Twain. The play was hilarious, presented by Theatre West Virginia (http://theatrewestvirginia.com/). They had done a workshop earlier in the day for high school students, so our community benefited in several ways from their visit.

Saturday morning we got up early, went into town to our favorite breakfast restaurant, the Downtowner, for a good country breakfast. We had to skip our usual visit to Rachel's Relics Antique store, and to Court Street Connection, because I wanted to meet with Ross Ballard, who is recording West Virginia titles as audiobooks with his company MountainWhispers (http://www.mountainwhispers.com/). He was signing and selling his latest offering, Crum by Lee Maynard (www.wvwc.edu/lib/wv_authors/authors/a_maynard.htm ), at Frog Creek Books (http://www.frogcreekbookswv.com/) at the Charleston Farmers Market. We had a great visit with Ross and I will be brainstorming with him about ways that those with WV recordings might work with him, or collaborate, or??? who knows? Maybe nothing will come of it, or maybe we'll end up with some great ideas for promoting West Virginia's oral traditions.

Meanwhile I had a great opportunity to talk with Mike of Frog Creek Books, and he is willing to try two of my CDs and two copies of The Zinnia Tales
(http://mountaingirlpress.com/booksandauthors.html) in his shop. If they sell, he'd take more. So I'm hopeful that this too will lead to other things.

We left there for Pikeville, Kentucky, to visit my husband's sister. The mountains were soft gray and looming in the pre-rain air, and ice clung in frozen waterfalls to the cliffs along the road. There are places I want to visit sometime along that road--the community of Big Ugly, the Hatfield-McCoy Trail, The Coal House in Williamson, and Olcott, the place my husband was born. We've been there a few times, but I want some photos fo the places he remembers. Many of them are gone of course--the company store, the coal tipple, the school, the house he grew up in--and he has no family left there. But there may be some remnants we can capture on film of the life of a kid growing up in coal country, surrounded by family and friends, the danger and uncertainty of the mines.

Today we're home and doing all the things required when you live in the country and heat with wood--getting in wood, cleaning out ashes, sweeping up debris from firewood, and catching up laundry, planning the brush-clearing on the hillside, checking the lettuce bed to see if anything is sprouting yet (only been planted three days but you never know), enjoying the fireplace even though it's a warm 54 degrees and sunny outside.

And I'm mulling over yesterday, thinking about the places we saw, wondering how to help my sister-in-law as she grieves over the death of her oldest son, trying to see what life was like for Larry and Mary as blond-headed twins in a dusty coal-mining community, seeking still to understand the hearts of those people who continue to delve for coal beneath those brooding hills. From all this may come a story. Or maybe just the deepening of a story. Or nothing more than a memory of a day of time well-spent in a place and with the people I love.