Everytime he passes the sign for Cabin Creek, Timothy James pulls off at the exit and parks his car along the bank of the tiny stream.
He walks down to its edge, kicks off his shoes, peels off his socks, rolls up his jeans, wades in up to his ankles, stares upstream, and wonders how it must have been back then, when Joyce Ann grew up here, well, grew up way up, the infamous creek.
Back then, there was a tight-knit community of coal mining families living in small wood frame houses, next to the creek, next to the mine, next to the company store, with immigrants from Great Britian, Ireland and Wales, African Americans from the South, poor whites from other parts of Appalachia, working shoulder to shoulder, picking and shoveling coal, returning home each evening, exhausted and covered in black dust, much of which also settled in their lungs. The miners were paid in scrip, coal company money only recognized by the coal company, and used it to pay their rent for their coal company houses and to buy their groceries from the coal company general store, a sorry imbalance that triggered the coal wars. Timothy James heard all these stories of growing up, way up Cabin Creek, over so many years of conversations with Joyce Ann, at her kitchen table, over pancakes and bacon, on Saturday mornings, after his sleepovers with his best friend, Joyce Ann's oldest son. That's what comes to mind now when Timothy James stands ankle-deep in Cabin Creek. Now, he always grabs a smooth flat stone or two, takes them home and pitches them into his vegetable garden, reminders of Joyce Ann's stories and times way back when.
I want to pick out one part of this, but as a whole it tells such a striking story and I fell in love with the narrative. And my feet got colder and colder as I read.. 😅
This made me cry. In public! Alone!❤️