the rose of kiev

Every time I go to West Virginia it seems that I am being adopted by someone else's family. My high school friend Tabatha brought Amy and I down the week after our graduation to spend a week on the holler where her mother's side of the family lives. I talked Tabatha and Amy into piercing my ear for me, which I quickly regretted with loud obscenities when they picked a needle too small. Later that summer, my dad's then-fiance Leah drove us down to her parents' home for a weekend of card games and adventuring in the woods. That was the week Josiah convinced me to bike down their steep gravel driveway; I came limping back to the house with a bloody hip after I used it as a brake. This past weekend I was officially adopted into a happy mess of McCray, Matheny and Mitchell relatives at an annual family reunion that Dave's Granny Rena and her cousins hold in their small birthtown of Nitro, West Virginia. The wide Kanawha (KA-NAW) River cuts through the soft Appalachian fo...

The other night Dave and I stayed up late to watch an hour-long show on PBS titled "Swimming in Auschwitz"; it was a compilation of interviews of 6 different women, and since it ran without commercials, Dave and I were sucked in until the end. Each of the women lost one or more family members in their stay at the camp; all had an admirable composure and dignity in retelling their stories, and one of the women was even able to recount some of her memories there with laughter.  Laughter. Something I have been learning to appreciate more and more lately are the loving and good-tempered elders in the world. You know who I mean, the people one or two or three generations ahead of us who care about others and are genuinely good-natured. I think they are so precious because they seem to be markedly rare. In my growing appreciation for such people I also have been obtaining a growing knowledge about how  hard  living is; that gratitude, of all the disciplines, gets more difficult wit...

my grandparents are in town this weekend, which meant I got my usual hour-long verbal scouring of my life and the panicky attack of tiny stressed out screams after the interogation was over and they unbelted me from the metal chair under the dim lightbulb. I swear, all they haven't done is given me a labatomy and search my brain manually. my mom is getting married in January to a guy she's only been dating for 5 months; my best friend Tabby is engaged to her boyfriend after dating him for 6 weeks with plans to move in with him after the new year. it's been a crazy couple of weeks discovering these fascinating tidbits from everyone, and reflecting on myself and my boyfriend ...could I do the same thing at this very second ? He and I have been dating a little over 4 months, and I can't even conceive marrying him or anything of that nature within the next year. It just doesn't compute - flatly. So why do my mother, who's literally f%#@ed up every romantic relations...

so I was in science class this morning and we're learning about, but really more laughing at, the 'modern ideas' that the medieval age came up with. and we, as sophisticated college students, scoffed at them and chuckled to ourselves and shook our intelligent little heads. the professor covered all sorts of things, from the Elixer of Life to the study of Alchemy that these ancient Greeks fervently believed could be found. he asked what age we would want to stay at - a lot of people said 23. he said 50, that way he could wear white shoes and drive a golf cart in Florida after retiring for the rest of forever. (that's a direct quote, too, white shoes and all) one of our professor's favorite things to do is ask the class who read this morning's paper and the news on it. even in the middle of writing on the board, the chalk will sometimes squeak to a stop and he'll turn around to tell us something interesting that happened lately. So right in the middle of writi...