Old friends

Two years have passed since the last get-together of the girlfriends (shown here absent Paula and with Suzi's daughter Katie joining us for breakfast). This year, we will be absent Nanell (front left) who is on Cape Cod, but we may have Patti's sister Jean to round out the group.

Yeah, we're getting on in years, some of us long since gone gray and others looking pretty much the same way they looked at Athens High School in the 1960s. But these women are still girls to me, each one unique and treasured. We can fall back and pick up the conversation where we left it two, five, or 25 years ago, with the kind of ease and acceptance only old friends can offer authentically.

I rejoice in my old friends, realizing that they are really a family to me. Time to not let old acquaintances be forgotten, time to renew our decades-long friendships, time to make new memories.

What we do doesn't really matter. It's the people we do it with. And these are, as Irene would say, my "peeps." It's amazing to me now to think that there was a time we considered ourselves unattractive, unpopular, un- just about everything. I'd say we all turned out, as Garrison Keilor would say, "above average."

Words to live by

I believe in the power of words. Before mass communications, advertising, TV pundits, and texting, words were a valuable commodity. People were said to "weigh their words." A man was "as good as his word." Oratory was an art, and poetry was read aloud in ordinary homes. People took oaths and held them sacred; family letters were kept and cherished; and oral histories were handed down with ceremony and care. The Bible tells us that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

            In my growing-up family where I was the youngest of five children, words shot like arrows hither and yon; discussions were lively and debates common. I read early and soon learned to pipe up or chime in — put my own oar in the proverbial water — just to get my basic needs met. The dictionary became my best friend since I had to catch those big, fat, fifty-cent words like butterflies in a net and examine them just to follow the constant stream of conversation.

            I learned early that words build bridges among individuals and cultures; and I developed an ease with them, whether talking to the old men chewing tobacco on “spit corner” or to professors in that college town where I grew up. Then, when I was just 22 years old, I moved to a barrio in Panama City, and there I used my best high-school Spanish to converse with my neighbor who would often yell, “Raton! Raton!” as she took a broom to the rats that were as pervasive as cockroaches. She would speak English to me, and we became friends that way: she with her halting English and I with my awkward Spanish.

            Ah, words! They comfort, soothe, stir to action, start and end wars, whisper of love and secrets, create poems, songs and plays. When I hear the lyrics of Paul Simon — words like “ghosts and empty sockets” or “diamonds on the soles of her shoes” — I know just what he means. I’ve written sonnets to my Italian professor, love letters to an Australian sailor, a family blog to help us celebrate and grieve the life and death of our parents; and I still relish a good diatribe that stirs the pot.

            For me, words are an artist’s palette. They hold endless possibilities for combining and blending to draw the pictures I see in my mind, and they hold the subtle shades of meaning implicit in every thought I convey. I love a good metaphor almost as much as a good story. Storytelling is in my DNA. My granddad told stories peppered with plenty of swear words, having been a coal miner and moonshiner; and my dad loved a good yarn. Growing up, I heard people say that my great-grandfather was such a colorful storyteller that people

looking for his home would be told to just “drive out that road a ways and look for the house where there’s a crowd gathered on the front porch.”

            But words are also fun. They can be tossed around like a beanbag and can bend the mind and stretch the imagination like a bungee cord. People can google, lollygag, or dillydally. They can be scalawags or roustabouts. Sometimes a word practically defines itself, and just the right word can land just the right punch. Once my daughter witnessed a neighbor berating me for stepping across an invisible property line to trim a bush. Coming to my rescue, she accused the woman of being a “quidnunc,” leaving her speechless. Oh, I was a proud mother that day, knowing that my daughter had memorized every “q” word in the dictionary, just so she could whup me in our rousing games of Scrabble.
            To me, words are little time machines. They can transport me to faraway places and draw me as close as breath. They connect me to my past, to my present, to my loved ones, near and far. I can still hear how my dad pronounced “creek” as “crick,” a telltale sign he grew up in the Appalachians where language is homespun and descriptive.

            Great speeches, simple sermons, and letters between friends can start movements, heal wounds, and open hearts. And they can express to an audience just exactly what I believe.

Happy Birthday Momma

One hundred years ago

This lovely woman was born on August 31 in 1913. Her father's brother, Uncle Floyd, lived to be a centenarian, and for a while, it looked at though Roena Shafer Simpkins, my mother, would follow suit. But a broken leg at age 94 led to her death just three months later.

Roena Elizabeth Shafter was the oldest of three children born to Martha (Wilson) Shafer and Carl (Don Carlos) Shafer, a home birth in a house on the other side of a swinging bridge in Athens Couty, Ohio. Though her sister was 13 years younger and her brother a few years younger, she outlived both of them. My dad pronounced her both the prettiest and the smartest girl he'd ever encountered, and I'm sure it was true. They married when she was not yet 19, smack-dab in the middle of the Great Depression, and she went on to give birth six times. It must have been heart-breaking to her to have lost her first child, Robert, on the first day of his life, but it was probably far from uncommon. 

The first of many things that was unusual about my mother is her name. She must have been named after the Lady Rowena in the novel Ivanhoe that many of us had to read in school. Lady Rowena became Rowena the Queen of Beauty and Love. Other than that, Sir Walter Scott doesn't tell his readers much about Rowena except that she is "mild, timid, and gentle" by nature and that she is "fair and beautiful." Somewhere there is the intimation that she is somewhat proud and snobby due to her sheltered upbringing. The only adjective here that does not apply to my mother is "snobby," though I do think she held herself a bit above the Simpkins lot, for which we all can easily forgive her, since she came from a home of greater refinement and sensibilities than did the moonshinin', fist-fightin' and hell-raisin' Simpkins clan.

Never having met or heard of another Roena, I checked ssa.gov's website for the last 100 years and found no record of "Roena" in the top 1000 baby names for any year. Under the spelling "Rowena," however, I discovered that it was the 458th most popular out of 1,000 in the year she was born..

Describing my mother factually is not generally my way, since I'm not especially interested in facts. But it was often her way, and if not factually, then thoroughly and with no details missing. She was, as I wrote years ago, our Chief Operating Officer to my dad's Chief Executive Officer. She never lost her marbles, never showed a hint of dementia even into her 94th and early 95th year. And with her beautiful fair skin largely unwrinkled and her keen interest in everyone around her, she kept her spark, her love for keeping order, her empathy for others, and both her inner and outer beauty until the end. And here's proof of what I write in a picture taken of her shortly before her 94th birthday on the day she and Daddy marked their 75th wedding anniversary.

Our last words to each other went something like this:

Momma (after setting the record straight about my being an unplanned and "unwanted" child and I responding half-jokingly with, "But aren't you glad you had me?"): Well, you never brought me shame. And I was always proud of you...especially your grades. But I never understood you.

Nannygoat (setting her lunch on the table and reaching to embrace her): That's okay, Momma, I never understood you either, but I love you.

Momma (not being a demonstrative woman and a bit flustered by my embrace): We English don't hug. 

It was true that I always knew I was "an apostrophe child," for having planned her first three children two years apart, she had more than fulfilled her motherhood role before my sister and I came along six and seven years later. But she was always there for all of us, never wavered in her devotion to her family, wanted -- no, needed -- to know all of the details of our lives. For after all, she had sacrificed her own dreams and ambitions for all of us. Valedictorian of her class and designated the student most likely to have "lots of letters" [degrees] following her name, she, like multitudes of women before and since that time, accepted her lot in life, adapted to circumstances, and soldiered on without complaint. She was a real trooper, my mom. She gave new meaning to "the ties that bind," setting an example that was awfully hard to follow but making me proud to be her daughter and wistful that I couldn't be more like her.

So here she is at nearly 89 with her brood of chicks, all grown up and accounted for. It is true that I never understood her any better than she understood me, but love is far greater than understanding. And I wish she were still here to celebrate that 100-year milestone. She loved life and didn't want to give up on it. Maybe I understand you better now, and I admire you more than ever. Happy Birthday, Momma.

Half a century ago

In 1963, on a small TV in grainy black and white pictures, I watched news reels of the historic March on Washington, D.C., longing even then, as a girl not yet 16 years old, to be there. The "n" word was common in my hometown and, much to my shame, in my own home, as I heard it used night after night earlier that year, especially when footage of young children in Birmingham -- just children peacefully walking to school -- were met by police who used high-pressure fire hoses on them without provocation. 

After Rev.King was imprisoned and wrote his eloquent letter from that city's jail, and the whole world was watching what was happening, officials from President Kennedy's administration finally got off their collective butts and tried to "negotiate," but it was too little, too late, and rioting ensued the next day-- but only after members of the KKK bombed Rev. King's home.

During all of those long, hot months, I silently watched and privately cried, feeling a white-hot shame for what our country was doing -- for what it was allowing to be done -- not to enemy combatants but to fellow citizens of our country -- people who were simply refusing to accept the abuse and crimes being committed against them. I couldn't understand how our president could stand by and do nothing. President Kennedy had set the bar high when he was elected, calling for us, the youth of America, to serve our country and change the world, with rhetoric that spoke directly to my ideal, young heart. But now this? THIS? It was too much for me to bear. Others must have felt the same indignation and shame, as calls for civil rights reform grew louder. I can clearly remember wondering why we never talked about any of this in our schools, why we children just a few states away were shielded from knowing about Jim Crow laws, segregation, and all of the misery and degradation that our country, our democracy, was turning a blind eye to. And mostly I remember the silence: the refusal to talk about it, as though not speaking of it would somehow make it all go away.

While the so-called grown-ups were seeing this on television -- the massive march on Washington, right there in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln -- I remember thinking that the Civil War wasn't over, that it might never be over, that all of its horrors might have been in vain, that the Union was preserved but its people were betrayed. I don't remember hearing Dr. King's entire address. It was too much for a lot of white people to hear. Where they expected hatred, there was love; where violence, nonviolence. Where they thought they would find ignorance, they found eloquence. Their dream was not the same as Martin Luther King's dream.

I like to believe that they felt shame, too-- that their fears were just the result of their own ignorance, that they would embrace the change that was now upon them. For the first time in my life, but not the last, I was ashamed to be white. I wish I were convinced that things are different now, that there is nothing but a rainbow coalition, but I know better. How much has really changed, not in our laws but in our hearts and minds? When President Obama was elected, I was there in that spot in front of the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate that at least a slim majority of our people had seen the light. And I pray now that the rest of them will let that light shine into their hearts and souls, too. Yes, we've come a long way, but we've still got a long way to go.

Let's keep marching.

A star is born!

Today, on our dad's birthday, my sister Loie told me that she had had an epiphany of sorts about our dad and the rest of us in the family. She wrote that it came while she was reading about how Merlin discovered at the age of 12 that his real father was Ambrosius and, with his wizard's sight, he knew that Ambrosius would become a king. And, she went on to write, "Wow, if you could pick a father, well, in your dreams only would you ever think it would be Ambrosius." That's what led to her little epiphany that our dad was the big star in our family, not really leaving any room for the rest of us to take on a starring role. It wasn't as though he planned it that way. It's just the way it was. He had a larger-than-life persona, a charisma, that just made him that way. While our mother was quite modest and took a back seat to him most of the time, she also kept him in check, pulling gently on the reins and cleaning up after the lot of us in the wake of our individual attempts to forge our own way in the world.

I can't think of Peck without Roena, named after Ivanhoe's love Rowena, the prettiest and smartest girl in the county who, despite her own ambitions and ability to shine in her own right, chose and married our dad. It strikes me that for all of Daddy's star qualities and stage presence, he might have fallen flat without Momma to back him up. This reminds me of the famous quote about Ginger Rogers, attributed to some guy named Bob Thaves who quipped (regarding Fred Astaire),  "Sure he was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards...and in high heels." Yep, Peck got star billing, but he would have been the first to admit that he needed a partner like Roena to keep dancing. And when Roena didn't need him to take care of her any longer, when she didn't want to dance anymore, he walked off the stage.

One thing my father did that is so rare today is this: He was his own man. He didn't dance to anyone else's music except my mother's. Happy birthday, Daddy. Thank you for being the star in our family. You taught me every lesson worth learning.

I Am a Pilgrim

Something Juancho wrote on his Big Ring Circus blog a day or two ago got me thinking about pilgrims and how we're all on a kind of pilgrimage through this life. In fact, while it can mean a journey to a shrine or to a sacred place, it also means, according to Webster, "the course of life on earth." So each one of us is a pilgrim, whether we feel a sense of purpose and direction or we just take life as it comes.

See, whenever I read something Juancho has written, it stays with me and works like yeast to expand my mind -- one of the marks of a great writer, which he is. The next thing I knew, I was humming an old, familiar country hymn that sent me scurrying to Youtube to listen to the whole thing. Surprisingly, the best version I found is this one by The Byrds, what Wiki calls "one of the most influential bands of the 1960s." Yep, it's right here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omLysJCkP8E&list=RD18omLysJCkP8E  There were the same haunting lyrics I remembered: 
                     I am a pilgrim and a stranger 
                     Travelling through this wearisome land 

                     I've got a home in that yonder city, good Lord 
                     And it's not not made by hand.

Ajax Rock was both a pilgrimage and a destination. For a time, we celebrated births, buried our dead, remembered our pasts, shared our stories and triumphs, and walked with each other on the journey. I miss that and don't know where else to find it. In the past few days, I've read the entirety of ajaxrock.blogspot.com. I've laughed and cried, felt wistful and loved, relived milestones in our lives, and found nobody home. Then I made a decision to do what Juancho and some of you advised when I asked, "To rock or not to rock?" I'm going to carry on, so whether anyone else joins me or I continue the pilgrimage alone to my final destination, I'm planning to do it on Ajax Rock. I may ramble, tell stories, play games or music, scrub the old rock down, be mundane or rise to some semblance of eloquence if visited by my muse, but I can't think of a better place to do it. After all, it's the place Loie and I sat on as little girls, planning our next adventure or resting up from one we'd just had. It's the place we began our pilgrimage, and y'all can come or stay. But I bet our paths will cross somewhere along the way.

So here I am, back to the rock, still trying to fathom the mysteries of life, the twists and turns in our separate journeys that will end in the same place. We have all grown older, some of us wiser, though I can't claim that for myself. No, I've been on a long and circular search for a home for Zach and me after we both lost our houses two years ago. We've been to the mountain top, living in the wilds of Tucker County, moved back to a house in the 'hood in the next county over, and now we're back where we started from -- back in Shepherdstown again.

The reason I can't claim to have grown any wiser is that I'm pretty sure there was one big lesson I was supposed to learn from all that moving, all of that upheaval fraught with worry and disappointment, all of that fear and sense of futility that just left me thirsty and hungry for something I couldn't name. It plumb wore me out.

But now that we're in safe harbor again, I've begun to see that the lesson was there all along, right in front of me. I just couldn't see a big enough picture, because it's hard to get a good view when you're face down on the pavement. When I packed for that leg of my pilgrimage, throwing out most of my possessions and stripping down to the necessities, I forgot to bring something really important -- the thing I seem to have left behind in the rubble and ashes of our old lives. I forgot to bring faith, the very thing that is for me as necessary as the air I breathe and the water I drink. What is it in my DNA that makes me as stubborn and hard-headed as the dickens -- that makes me think I'm smart enough to head off on the journey without my compass or my GPS? When will I learn to walk by faith and not by sight?

The answer to that might come to me as I sit here on the rock again, the best place I've found to ponder and rest for the next leg of the journey. I am a pilgrim and a stranger -- even to myself. C'mon over if you need a place to rest and regroup. There's room for more.   

How green is my valley

It wasn't so long ago, on a hot spring day up here on the mountaintop, that the old-timers were worried about a water shortage and problems for the farmers because the past winter's snowfall was so far below average. April passed without much rainfall, but the rains came.
Although spring unfolds slowly up here, the valley is now green and there is talk of flooding in the towns at lower elevations. Now, when I look outside where snow recently covered the ski slopes, I see green, even on that big, old tree outside my kitchen window.

The rains are welcome, keeping the air chilly and the nights good for sleeping. The wildlife refuge looks different, too, reminding me once again that water is life-giving. Nature is back in balance again.

Appalachian spring

After some wild thunderstorms and heavy rain last night, I woke up to a sparkling, cool, and sunny day, with the sounds of birds mating and nesting outside my window. Church didn't seem nearly so appealing as a walk in the "Sods" again, this time to check out the shy approach of spring on the mountaintop. Although Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring really had nothing to do with Appalachia, it was taken from a Hart Crane poem about springtime in the Adirondacks. His ballet score won the Pulitzer Prize for Music not long before I was born, in 1945, and I've always loved the music, much of it taken from Shaker melodies, the most recognizable of which is Simple Gifts. That seemed exactly the right soundtrack for my trek into the wilderness this morning, just six days after snow covered the mountains and the valley. No iPod for me, because I like to listen to the stillness, broken occasionally by a sound of something moving in the forest or overhead.

Among my finds this morning were several large vernal pools containing hundreds and hundreds of tiny tadpoles. See them in there, all scrambling to survive as the "fittest" and grow into frogs before the pools dry up? It was fascinating to watch -- some aggressive and propelling themselves through the water like Olympic swimmers and others taking the "slow traffic" lane as they languished in the cold water. Suddenly I could hear Daddy pronounce the word "pollywog" and felt his presence there in that hushed place. That happens to me a lot, sensing that Momma or Daddy is there with me in my alone times. What a comfort it is!

I also found lots of mosses in the boggy places, including the reindeer moss, which is really a lichen and is that same grayish green in color. It's one of those plants not found south of northern Canada, with the exception of in the Dolly Sods. It was growing in large clumps that showed new growth.
I looked carefully under leaves for any of the many species of salamanders and newts that are so numerous here that zoologists who study them hold most of their scholarly conferences here and elsewhere in the Appalachians, but I didn't find any.

Just as I turned to make my way back, I heard human voices that seemed out of place in my sanctuary and soon passed two hikers from Virginia who seemed to be oblivious to their surroundings. My morning worship service was over, and I turned to take a photograph of the road as yet untaken before I descended the mountain, still humming 'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free.... Whether Copland intended it or not, his music is a perfect score for the slow unfolding of spring in the Appalachians.

Peck's Place

This is one of the views from the window of the little house I'm hoping to buy. See that little building down below? It used to be a drive-through bank, part of the beautiful stone bank across the street, now home to the post office, a little shop, and apartments upstairs.

Now Loie and Don got Daddy's business sense, leaving me with very little ability and even less interest in having a little business. There's Eye Spy, of course, but it's not brick-and-mortar, and it doesn't make much money. But I remember when Daddy, even while in the dementia unit of First Community Village, got restless and wondered what kind of business he could get going so he'd have something to do -- and that kind of can-do spirit must be a recessive gene that has been lying dormant. Because when I look at that little building standing empty -- right on the the main street of Davis -- what I see is a little business, one that offers office-away-from-home services to all of the vacationers who come to the mountains without their scanners and fax machines and copiers and shipping and mailing supplies. There's not even a reliable FedEx drop box or UPS shipping site here or in the valley.

And the name for that little business could only be "Peck's Place." Peck's place for ... copies. Peck's place for ... small print jobs. Peck's Place for ... faxing, for mailing, for computer use and wi-fi. Even Peck's place for mail delivery -- for "General Delivery" for people who don't need a six-month post office box but who need a delivery address while they're here. And of course we'd have to have Peck's place for editing and proofreading, right?


So, once I get my life settled down a bit and, hopefully, live right across the street, I'm going to sleuth around the resorts, property management offices, and local businesses to do my homework before writing a business plan. 


This little place speaks to me. Drive-through service. Main street location. There's even a vault and a night depository. It's a natural. And it even has a tiny bathroom. The wheels are turning in this head. Daddy would be proud, I think.