Last week when we went to Charleston for the Coal River Mountain rally, I suddenly realized – it was Christmastime and I was in Charleston, for the first time in more than 30 years.  I had trouble finding the Southside Bridge, so we ended up driving down a bit of Quarrier Street. Christmastime in the city isn’t what it used to be. Last time I was there, the grand department stores had not yet died, replaced by malls. Capitol and Quarrier were still the heart of the business district,  the streets filled with shoppers and businesspeople. There really were bright lights and silver bells.

We generally made at least two trips to Charleston in the fall; sometime in November and then in early December, after the lights were up.  After Thanksgiving, my father’s store was busy and open late every night, so he could only go on the early trip.  Before the interstates were built, the 50 miles to Charleston were slow, down 119 to Clendenin and then on down the Elk.  So Mother always had a long list, and an itinerary planned through downtown, to get the most out of the trip.  We had to dress up, too – not quite Sunday best, but nicer than school clothes.  We had to live up to the glamor of the department stores – the Diamond, Stone &Thomas, Coyle & Richardson’s.  I could sketch the first-floor layout of each one.  I can see the millinery section just inside the Quarrier Street entrance of Stone & Thomas, at the foot of the escalator – a counter of multicolored gloves, laid out in rows and rows of trays.  A back wall with dozens of hats, multicolored felt in winter.  A small Christmas tree on the counter, and around the bend, more rows of trays, of many-patterned silk scarves.

Each store had certain departments we thought “best.” Books and housewares at the Diamond; coats and sweaters and what were then known as “foundation garments” at Stone & Thomas; shoes and a wonderful piece goods department at Coyle’s. We always went to the Piecegoods Shop; some Christmases I got lengths of fabric under the tree, to be made up later.  We  parked at a tiny lot behind the YMCA and the Rose City Cafeteria.  Sometimes we would have dinner at the cafeteria; often we would meet (after splitting into various pairs for secret shopping) at the drugstore on the corner in the Daniel Boone Hotel. I was fascinated by the catty-corner crosswalk at that busy intersection, with its own walk light.

I suppose it was not so different and not more magical than the mall department stores today.  But now I am much older and have seen more of the world. “Glamor” was originally a Scots corruption of “grammar,” which once upon a time meant not just the rules of a language, but the principles or rules of any art or science, including magic and alchemy.  So the romance, charm, and excitement of glamor ultimately comes from the sophistication of the glamorous – the esoteric knowledge of the city people.

Last week, our dinner guests almost didn’t make it out after dinner.  We got their coats from the library closet and ended up in the front parlor.  There is an French door with sidelights identical to the front door in the living room, but you can’t get out.  The door is currently nailed shut, and has a wrought-iron railing across it on the outside. We know from the old plans that the door into the library was originally directly across from the outside door in the parlor.  When we pulled up the carpet, the wear made it clear that the main traffic once went from outside to the room now the library.

Today I ran across an article on double front doors by Bill Kibbel at Old House Web.  We had speculated on a couple of the folk explanations he has collected for double front doors, but hadn’t settled on anything convincing. He concludes they are purely style, a solution to preserving symmetry on a Georgian facade without a central hall, used by the Dutch, Quakers, and German immigrants in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the 18th and 19th centuries.   Those are the people, along with the Scots-Irish, who settled this area.

Of course, our house is much newer than that, and the facade is no longer symmetrical – besides more elaborate trim around the remaining working door, a room was added to one side.  But in the double front doors, here is one more hidden influence from the frontier settlers of more than 200 years ago.

Food seems to be more popular than anything else on the web. My few food posts certainly get more hits than anything else.  My mother was a plain cook, except for desserts (which were only for Sundays and holidays), although she occasionally did very odd things inspired by women’s magazines.  We were “comfortable”, not poor, but there wasn’t a lot of money for extravagance in food (or anything else). The grocery store didn’t have a lot of exotic food, anyway.

I had just finished college when the first oil crisis hit.  Hamburger went from 29 cents a pound to $1.29, as gas went from 29 cents to $1.29 a gallon.  I quit eating meat.  The next year, I moved back to my home town, where lots of “hippie farmers” had moved in while I was away.  Most of my high school friends had gone to college and not come back.  My friends became hippie farmers, and many of them were vegetarian.  I met a Seventh Day Adventist couple then in their 50s who shared their vegetarians ways with me. I read Adele Davis, who was seen as a radical at the time, although she had graduate degrees in nutrition and biochemistry from distinguished universities, and Francis Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. These women established the ideas that a mainly vegetarian grain and bean-based diet was best for us and for the planet. Now, more than 30 years later, a third of the population is obese and our health costs are skyrocketing, and industrial farming, especially of beef, is a major contributor to pollution and user of non-renewable energy.  A new generation, and a lot of mine, is “discovering” slow food, local food, organic food, healthy food.  What on earth happened? And will we ever learn?

For all those years, I have been eating that way and raised two children, one of whom is now a much stricter vegetarian than I ever was.  My husband and I worked full time (and more), volunteered at church, led the kid’s Camp Fire clubs, and finished graduate school.  Cooking this way was cheap, easy, quick, satisfying, and nutritious. We were not fanatic about meat, although we rarely had meat more than once or twice a week, and I didn’t sprinkle everything with wheat germ, bean sprouts, or sunflower seeds, or use tofu, veggie burgers, or “fake meat.” Somewhere along the way I found Nikki & David Goldbeck’s American Wholefoods Cuisine, which has everything from soup to nuts, including a great short-order section for quick healthy meals.  My cooking is basically my mother’s plain cooking, with whole wheat flour, little meat, and none of the amazing cakes, cookies, and candy my mother produced.  I’ll continue to post menus and recipes here, in hopes that people will see how easy and “normal” healthy cooking can be.

Saturday night, we had friends for supper, and I was thanked for catering to a vegetarian on the Ornish diet, which, other than expecting you to cut down even more on oils, butter, cheese, eggs, nuts, and other high-fat foods, is just what Adelle Davis, Francis Moore Lappé, and the Goldbecks were teaching all those years ago.  I picked dishes without cheese and eggs, left out the oil in the stew and the salad dressing, but otherwise cooked as I usually do.  Here’s what we had:

Sweet potato oven fries with drinks beforehand

A “warm salad” of plain frozen vegetables (I used a broccoli, green bean, and mushroom mix) with a dressing of just balsamic vinegar, salt, and fresh-ground pepper.

Wholewheat cottage loaf

Beans from Brittany (a stew from the Goldbecks)

Poached pears with buckwheat crepes and yogurt sauce

Washed down with cider (hard cider for some of us)

Last week, just before the snow, I trimmed the juniper bushes along the front stoop.  They had been looking raggedy, with new growth shooting up every-which-way, for some months.  I was waiting, though, to do what my mother did each Christmas – trim the evergreens to decorate the house.  For the first time, I have mantels to deck with evergreen branches.  I’ve gone wild and topped all the living room door frames with branches, too, and the windowsills in the parlor, the library, the bathroom, and our bedroom, where we have candles in the windows.

The St. Nicholas Day decorations – Juleknisse and other small ornaments, were strewn on various shelves last Sunday.  This weekend we will get out the rest of the decorations, and add more greens and ribbons here and there.  The tree will wait until our children arrive next weekend.

Activists rallied this afternoon at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.  I can’t say more or better than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Please listen to his speech at HeadOn Radio. The gaps are the points where the coal trucks circling the block were leaning on their air horns to drown him out.   Kathy Mattea’s spokesperson just said “Honk if you love mountains” when they did that, and the speakers after that picked it up.

To all my friends outside West Virginia, we need your help. It is not just our problem. We all live downstream, and the pollution from coal-mining and coal-fired coal plants poisons us all.  Bobby Kennedy said today the coal companies are liquidating the mountains for quick profits.  They have corrupted our politicians to do it.  It is a national problem, and we need you to help to stop it.

Watch the Coal River Mountain Video which will be shown in Copenhagen.

Email your Senators and tell them to pass the Appalachian Restoration Act. If Congress is serious about addressing climate change, we need this bill to dramatically reduce mountaintop removal coal mining, which is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

Learn more or contribute at www.iLoveMountains.org.

Coal River residents talk about why this matters

Lots of folks here in West Virginia are scornful of “tree-huggers” who “care more about mayflies than people.”  Which is, of course, like saying that miners cared more about canaries than about themselves.  If the mayflies in a stream have died, something has gone wrong with the watershed, and like as not, whatever is wrong is likely to hurt the surrounding people, too.  And there is a domino effect – insects and fish that eat mayfly larvae starve, and on up the chain.  It’s all interconnected.  Scientific American reported recently on a connection between nature and our health.

A wildlife biologist from Vermont and several others reviewed a lot of studies on new diseases, like West Nile virus and Lyme disease.  They found that people are way more likely to get new diseases in areas where there are fewer kinds of plants and animals.  For example, white-footed mice, which along with deer mice are the ones that make themselves at home in hunting cabins when we aren’t there, thrive in woods or brush where there aren’t very many other animals – like the woods and vacant lots along the edge of town or farms.  White mice are good carriers of the Lyme disease bacteria.  When there were more animals other than people – from rabbits to pumas and everything in between – the ticks preferred them.  Now we’re down to us, the deer, and the white mice – and the ticks don’t have much choice.  Bingo – lots more people getting Lyme disease.

All of our actions are like a stone tossed in a pond.  The ripples spread in every direction and we don’t always know what they swamp or shake loose.  We didn’t make the mountain, we don’t know how the forest that covers it works, and we don’t know what we are breaking when we take it apart.  We cannot live without killing plants and animals, but we need to try to understand the costs before we do. And we also need to remember that the benefits may not be all we think they might be.

Jesus said, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” (Luke 12:18)

Sometime in the 1910s, my great-grandmother Jane Hill deGruyter and her daughters, Eunice and Iona, made a pair of crazy quilt tops. Mine is mostly light woolens and dark dress fabrics; the other is fancier fabrics, satins and brocades.  The pieces may have been scraps from the household’s clothes, but Aunt Eunice made her living as a seamstress, so they may have included leftovers from her work.  All of the seams are embroidered over in crewel wool in a variety of stitches.  Some pieces have embroidered pictures, including an apple tree with little red apples.

Crazy quilts were popular from the 1880s up until about the First World War, so this one was late in the period.  The style was influenced by the Japanese arts and crafts displayed at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. The irregular pieces didn’t lend themselves to quilting or tufting like geometrical patchwork or comforters, and generally had no batting.

In the 1960s, my mother finished the tops with black velveteen borders and backings.  When my parents died, my brother and I each ended up with a quilt, and I with another great-grandmother’s bed. I put the quilt on the bed, until eventually I realized that I had two cats and a baby, and perhaps sleeping under the quilt was not as important as preserving it. We hung it on the living room wall.

Now the quilt is hanging on my fourth living room wall.  I had missed it. We took it down and brought it with us when we came to camp out here in the new old house last year. It completely covered one wall of our old living room, and two of the others were floor-to-ceiling books.  We felt it gave the living room a warm and cozy feel, but our real estate agent felt people would be looking for large and airy.  I wouldn’t have left it alone with strangers, in any case.  The new living room is large and airy, the books are living in the library, and the quilt brightens the neutral room, and my heart.

The view from the dining room is black and white this morning – a forest of snow-coated branches.  Beyond them the hills across the West Fork and up the valley are invisible, hidden by distant air white with snow.  Our hillside house has become an island in the sky.

Poking around the web for my initials (LdeG), I found a post on a gene I share, at Basically Balanced.  I too have a problem with waste, inherited from my father, who always say “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.”

I also share Carol’s thought that

There are so many times I wish I had an “off” button for my mind and hopefully this will help!

While too much reading of political blogs and on-line newspaper comments can be depressing, there are also all those like Carol and me, who are thinking through their lives and sharing those thoughts.  Most of us, I think, are not trying to  impress, or convince, or gain a following, just to work through who and where we are – and leave a record for whoever might find it.  How wonderful that so many are willing to share, and that we can have glimpses into other’s lives – and not just those we know, but those with different lives and points of view who we might otherwise never meet.

I’m working on adding more links to the Inspiration list in the sidebar.  There are all sorts of lives and points of view there, but all of them share a willingness to lead an “examined life” and share it, which is what I find inspiring.

Perhaps someone might say, “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.

- Socrates, as reported in Plato’s Apologia

Of course, they weren’t convinced, and he was condemned to death.

Sitting on a front porch visiting last week, we agreed we never tired of watching the play of light on the hills.  Yesterday was a dark and cloudy day, with cold rain from time to time.  But at sunset, the view from the dining room where my computer currently lives was haunting.  The bare maples were lacy black against the lavender sky, and through them a thread of rose above the blue-gray hills on the horizon. The rose swelled up into the blue and then in moments had faded away.

I love the light inside our house, too.  One of my rules for retirement, after decades of rising in the dark,  was that I would not get up before daylight.  Our bed is placed so  the sunrise can be seen from the window most of the year.  These days, it has passed from one window and not made it to the next, so even on clear days, I can first see it only indirectly, past the French door, shining on the wall in the sewing room.