Appalachian Fall

We are a family of six posed against a backdrop of scarlet and marigold, butterscotch and evergreen. On this highest mountain ridge east of the Rockies, autumn’s main event is in full swing. Ribbons of colors tumble down mountain peaks to meet in Blackwater Falls State Park below. Later we hike to a trout stream, the bravest among us traversing boulders to get a better view of a rustic bridge.

The youngest, my three-month old granddaughter Nellie, is snug in my son-in-law’s backpack. I look at her sweet smile and think everything is all right in this world. But I know it isn’t. Every day, children are dying of bombs and famine in Gaza, thousands are rebuilding lives shattered by hurricane Helene, and our nation faces an election that threatens to install a narcissistic tyrant in the White House. The list seems infinite. But just for a moment, I linger in wonder. I keep breathing.

There were once 1,000 coke ovens blazing in this part of northeast West Virgina. At the turn of the century the Davis Coal and Coke Company was among the top coal producers in the world, holding over 100,000 acres of coal land. The black gravel paths in our Airbnb development wind past piles of coal ash, reminders of the backbreaking labor it took to support families here. But there are also pods of milkweed, faded goldenrod, and dried white blossoms of meadowsweet, which I read can treat heartburn and was used to flavor mead in colonial days. I like to think it still is.

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us-giving us moments of wonder and joy.”

Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

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Trips, more often than not, trigger memories.   I traveled to West Virginia from Chicago when I was ten on a family vacation to visit a friend of my dad’s- a fellow chemical engineer. Navigating the hairpin curves like a Chevy in a pinball game made us all a little nauseous by the time we reached Clarksburg.

 At the town pool I met Jennie Cone, a girl about my age with brown pigtails falling on her shoulders and a ready smile. I was happy to have a friend my own age, given I had three younger brothers and a baby sister. Holding our noses, Jennie and I jumped off the high dive and cannonballed off the side of the pool, ignoring the lifeguard whistles. Because she lived in a mountainous state nearly 1,000 away from the flatlands of Illinois, Jennie was exotic.  She became my first pen pal, long before I would write to a mysterious French boy named Jean Paul who rode a motorcycle and a friend named Brenda in New Zealand who signed her onion skin letters with “TTFN” Ta Ta for Now.  I don’t remember what Jennie and I wrote about, but we probably exchanged words about tortuous bristle hair curlers, sleepovers and middle school crushes.

 A cedar keepsake box I received in high school holds a silver charm bracelet I kept as a young girl. A canoe for family vacations in Wisconsin, a blue and gold pennant for my high school, a four-leaf clover my mom bought me for luck in a spelling contest. There is also a blue enamel map of West Virginia- with a silver star marking Clarksburg, birthplace of Stonewall Jackson. But for me, Clarksburg, West Virginia, will always be the place where I met Jennie Cone.