I remember going through the shop my great-great-grandparents had in West Virginia. It was an old-time gas station and local shop. As I remember it, it was complete with soda fountain. The building was pretty old when I was there in about 1978, and unbelievably, it seems it still stands. The gas pumps are long gone, of course, and now it is attached to a greenhouse in front of Erma’s old house. It was Erma Foor that owned it, and if the current owners were to go into the cemetery behind the house, I think they would find her grave there. Talk about a small world that Erma lived and died in! Work and home and a grave all within maybe 300 feet of each other or so! The place was called The Plant Cult when the more recent people had it, and I don’t know if it is still. I am relying on Google Earth to find this out. The cemetery is Mount Calvary. And the house is now hidden behind the old greenhouses that are in what once was the front yard to Erma’s house. I wonder if that closet next to the front door still has the pull chain flap in the floor where the laundry can be dropped down next to the washer and dryer in the basement? When I was a little kid and visited there, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. What a convenience!
It was not the only place I visited around Morgantown back then. Go up northwest to Black’s Run Road and there just before the Pennsylvania State line you will find Willa and Lester’ Raber’s house on the left side of the road. There was a hutch built-in in the dining room and to the right of it was a door that opened to a very steep set of stairs that lead upstairs. There was also a screened in porch on the back of the house and in it was a glider rocker that would sit three or so. That old thing is still out in my back yard now, 47 years later. Their kitchen table is in pieces out in my shop. Ask me why. Anyway, I will have to get it back together someday, maybe this summer. That would be nice. (I started to restore it to use for myself, and the minute I did, my grandmother suddenly went from not interested in it to wanting it for herself the moment I was done. I stopped work immediately, because that was not the first time I had been through that shit-show with her.) When I was there with my grandparents, granddad and I did something remarkable. He took me for a walk up the road so we could have a piss on the Mason-Dixon Line. What a momentous occasion! Still sticks with me till this day as one of the most amazing trips we ever took, and we took a lot of them together when I was a kid.
All this came back to me again tonight. I am sure I wrote about it before. But it is there, lingering in my mind, wishing I could grab it all and pull it out and walk my kids into that world at that time, and let them see somethings that belonged to people who were born more than 100 years before them. Hell, Lester was 92 in ’78! That would have put him as born in 1886 or so. Do these kids realize I have known people born that far back? Do they know how close history really is to them? If the people we met were simply neighbors in the next house, that would put the late 1800’s right next door to us. They don’t know. I mean, we have a picture that comes up in a digital frame every now and then of the guy who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. When was that? June 28th, 1914? That means Lester was about 28? It’s crazy. If my math is correct.
I am off to get some wood on the fire and find a light meal for supper. I wanted to leave this here though. Who knows? Maybe the people who live in the old houses will find it one day and get in touch. I wonder how things are that way. I have always had a place in my heart for that part of West Virginia.