fallen down house

After being away from home for four years now, I have to come to understand that visiting family has and will always be an experience of some sort or another. I'm in West Virginia at the moment, trying to breathe a bit before I pack my bags (Mike and I are leaving this evening).

It was a short trip this year (we drove in on the 24th). Anyway, I had to stick around Berea a little longer than expected this year in order to tie up some loose ends -- aka, I had to work on editing Carillon, work on the chapbook, take care of the cats, put together the new podcast, and then of course there's the new remix coming together: I recently acquired the vox track of Dntel's "Dumb Luck" from the album of the same name. I'll let everyone know when it's available.

Berea would have been a lonely place had it not been for the squatters. (Erin and Mike stayed at my house over the break - Erin for the first week before taking the train to Michigan, and Mike, well, has been camping at my place since the beginning of the break, and will be staying until the end, around the 2nd of January.) Good people = good company. Lots of really lovely dinners and hilarious conversations.

The drive to WV was uneventful aside from nearly hitting a beagle near Huntington.

The past couple of days in West Virginia, though short, have been pretty relaxing. Christmas, Mike and dad and I dug potatoes in the garden despite the cold, and then followed up our toiling with some time in the sauna.

Today Mike and I helped dad salvage wood from a house that had been torn down and then left to rot in a heap in Winona, a small hamlet of sorts a few miles away from us.

Winona is one of those little little impoverished creekside villages that seem to define rural West Virginia. Nestled in a narrow "holler" along a waterway that sinks into the New River Gorge, Winona is sweltering and a surreal green in the summer, full of timber rattlers and mosquitoes. Come winter the maples are stripped bare and the old narrow houses themselves, relics from when Winona was once a booming mining town, seem to sag even more than before on their crumbling foundations. The grayness of the place is startling, shaken only by the occasional bright red "rebel" flag, or, this time of year, large nylon inflatable Christmas characters - usually snowmen or Santa Clauses peppering the paper-strewn yards.

Mike and I were so taken by the strangeness of the environment around the crumpled house, by the bleakness and desecration of it, that we agreed to come back later for a photo shoot of the place, and did so.

Here's a photo from the trip. I'll put the rest of them up on Flikr eventually.

More eventually.