80s punk

Charlie got a haircut this past week and I decided to have some fun with it.  I asked them to leave him enough on the top of his head to make a mohawk and leave him a bit of a mustache and goatee.  Add his stud collar and denim vest, and I've got a little 80s punk rocker on my hands!

The video clip below is Charlie looking for me after he got out of the house.  I had gone to talk to a property owner, and Charlie does not like me being outside without him.  If he sees me leave in the car, he's fine.  But if I'm visiting a neighbor he expects to go with me.  You can see in the video he is looking around to find me, but doesn't see me.  What he did next was pretty amazing.  He went next door to Brenda and Joey's house and barked at their screen door until Joey let him in.  Then Brenda walked him back to see if I was okay and eventually found me in the neighborhood.  I should rename him, Lassie or Laddie, because it was a "Timmy fell down the well!" kind of rescue attempt for him.

Even when Brenda went across the street to look for me, he knew to wait at the front door and didn't come across the street until I called out to him.

Such a good dog.  Totally worth the extra treats he got.

I am moving again. 

This house showed on Monday afternoon, and whether or not the young family makes an offer to buy, the stress of not knowing where I will go with a dog and two cats if it is sold is just too much to continue doing.  I am physically sick from the time I get the appointment notice until a few days after it is shown.

  I knew a house nearby was going to be available to rent, or going up for sale, so I talked to the owner and he agreed to rent it to me on a five-year lease.

  It will get me to an age where if I choose to stop working, I can.  I will also be at a point where if I want, I can downsize to a much smaller apartment in a 55+ community, on a fixed income rent rate, closer to my sister and nephews.  Options only at this time, but at least for five years I can sleep easy without the fear of a 30-day move-out notice and being faced with no options.

WfW ~ the men in black...

I am writing with Words for Wednesday, which can be found here.

The goal of WfW is to take given prompts, be they words, phrases, photos, colors, or music and create a story from them. 

 This week's words and color of the month are in bold italics. 

 If you visit the Elephant's Child blog, you can also read and cheer on the other writers participating in this weekly fun.

This is a continuing WfW story that started here on April 5th.

I left off on the 21st with the story of a five-generation counterfeit and con game about to catch up with someone...

  Jack looked over his shoulder, his right hand clawing a little at his left wrist as though he had an itch he couldn't quite scratch.

  "Yeah.  The men in black.  About them.  Unfortunately for us, they work for the government, and that little stunt we pulled back at the Chuck E Cheese might have gotten us in a bit of hot water."

  "What do you mean, 'hot water?'"

  Jack put on his sunglasses and purveyed the landscape around us as if looking for something.

  "Well, they work for the Treasury Department and have been on the trail of that drop hammer and family for quite some time.  Especially since it has become an international issue when a particular Grandee Ferreira from Portugal was conned out of a couple million dollars worth of anodyne when the escudo used to purchase it turned out to be fake."

  "I'm lost now.  I thought we were just dealing with fake coins from the future.  And ano who?"

  "Anodyne.  A pain relieving medication used to reduce the brain's sensitivity.  Not so much a popular name for them now, but they act like an analgesic.  Except that in large doses, and mixed with certain illegal narcotics, they can become so much more.  There is more resilience in the brain to not become addicted in a way that causes people to become hopeless."

  "But still addicted?"

  "Yes, but it's not like the opioid addicts.  These new addicts can be totally functional, and unaware that they are even addicted.  That is until they haven't taken any in a week or so.  The pain goes away, they stop taking it, then the pain starts to come back worse than before.  It reaches a point where it is the pain itself that makes them hopeless and unable to function.  It is a new luxury drug that is so far only available to the elite in this country.  For now, it's not one that is going to become affordable to the people who could probably benefit from it the most.  Those who are truly in pain with little or no health insurance."

  "Is it even available with health insurance?"

  "Oh no.  It is completely illegal because it hasn't been fully tested at all, and most of the time, the users don't even know what it has been mixed with."

  "That doesn't sound like it falls under the Treasury Department's slice of the jurisdiction pie."

  "Imagine if you will all of the fingers of the Justice Department getting involved in this one little con of fake coins.  You've got drug trafficking.  Murder.  Counterfeiting.  Money laundering.  Just a rainbow of laws broken here and abroad.  There isn't an agency in the world that doesn't have this family on their radar."

  "You know, Jack, it might be high time we get out of the private detective business and do something normal for a change.  Maybe find a little beachfront bar in the Bahamas.  Get a deep-sea fishing boat we could name The Coriander and just spend a little time fishing and drinking margaritas."

  "Why on earth would you want to name a boat after cilantro, Simon?  That is the stupidest name I've ever heard for a boat."

  "After Cori Ann.  You know.  That woman I was falling in love with that I met at the art exhibit?  Remember?  About 15 years ago when we were doing that job trying to catch a guy cheating on his wife?  Cori Ann made these amazing portraits where she painted with dry spice and used herbs so that you didn't even realize it was made with actual plants.  They looked like photographs."

  "Didn't you two date for a few years? What happened with that?"

  "Sage.  Sage happened, and it broke me.  I just couldn't deal with it at the time, and I wasn't there for her when she needed me.  She left."

Sunday ~ Old Stone Church Cemetery

  I went to a new church this morning, and after the service, I took advantage of the fact that it was close to the Old Stone Church Cemetery to explore.

  But first I visited the African American cemetery (aka the Dick Pointer Cemetery) across the street from it.  It's so odd to me that there would be a separate cemetery for people of color, but I have to remind myself that racial segregation "ended" (legally, anyway) just within my generation ~ two years after I was born.

  I think the cemetery was renamed in 1982 when there was a dedication for Dick Pointer's grave, and maybe also when the larger stone monument was put up.  Both cemeteries were originally granted in 1850 to expand a town cemetery and "designated a portion of the conveyed land as a "burial place for Whites" and a portion to be used as a burial place for "Africans or Blacks."

  < This gravestone caught my attention because of the age of the mother that passed, 108 years old!  Her son was 75 when he passed just a few years later.  No other stones nearby with either of their last names, indicating a husband or father, so she might have been a single mother.  He would have been born before the Civil War started, and since they were both in the African American cemetery, it is an unfortunate fact of life at that time she could have been raped by someone who "owned" her because [link>] there were slaves in West Virginia at the time he would have been conceived.

  > Sadly, it was the picture and sentiment on this stone for a young 19-year-old woman that caught my eye.  "She faltered by the wayside, and the angels called her home."  She was buried in the African American cemetery, but her photo appears to be of a white female.  I'm not sure if it was also a cemetery in the 1920s for those who did not belong to the Presbyterian Church across the street.

  I feel like there is a story there.  I may renew my Ancestry.com membership this fall when the weather gets too cool to be outside on the weekends and do some digging.  There is also a book that the Friends of the Old Stone Church Cemetery has put together with information on those buried in both locations that I might see about getting a copy of.

  [link>] The Old Stone Presbyterian Church (in the background of the picture on the left) was built in 1796 and is one of the oldest churches in continuous use west of the Allegheny Mountains.  It escaped destruction during the Civil War due to its use as an emergency hospital for both Union and Confederate troops. After the Battle of Lewisburg on May 23, 1862, Old Stone's sanctuary housed fallen Confederate troops prior to their "burial" in an open trench near the south wall of the church.   They were later moved to a larger mounded "plot" in the shape of a cross with about 95 Union soldiers who had died.

  The cemetery is huge, and I had all the best of intentions to walk both sides, top to bottom to get all my steps in for the day.  Unfortunately, the 80+ heat and the fact that many of the graves had settled over the centuries made the ground extremely uneven and unlevel.  I did not want a broken ankle from a misstep for a grave I didn't see.  But I did walk about 75% of the left side in the picture here.  

  It was a fascinating mix of men killed in the Civil War, whole families (some with surnames I recognized from people I knew), and tragically young children.

  I did see one stone marking an entire family that had a son who died on the same month and day (not year) I was born.  A little morbid that I look for that date, but yeah, I do.  I would like to go back to the cemetery as a planned walk with more appropriate shoes and maybe some paper and charcoal to do stone rubbings. There were some beautiful cut stones and marble.

Saturday ~ Kate's Mountain

   This morning the little man and I took a drive up Kate's Mountain.  I'd heard it was beautiful but had never been, and wasn't sure what to expect.  

  The mountain was named for Catherine "Kate" Carpenter who took refuge on it with her daughter, Frances, in September of 1756 after Indians attacked the settlements along the Virginia border.  Her husband,  Nicholas, had gone for help to Fort Dinwiddie on the Jackson River but was killed when Indians then attacked the fort.  Kate decided to relocate to Staunton, VA where Frances grew up and married, later inheriting her parents' 950-acre property in White Sulphur Springs, which became the site for the [link>] Greenbrier Resort.

Looking down at the Greenbrier Resort

  It is the highest peak (3,280 feet) in the Greenbrier State Forest and the type location for [link>] Kate's Mountain clover, Trifolium Virginicum.  Kate's Mountain was also the inspiration for a 19th Century poem that was published in its entirety in 1895, titled [link>] The Mystic Circle of Kate's Mountain.

  On the one hand, it was more than I expected.  Almost like being in a rainforest, it was thick and lush with old-growth trees and so much greenery.

  I saw sumac, daisies, milkweed, several different types of clover, and sweet pea flowers.  We stopped a few times to listen to the birds, and I was able to add two new species to my life list [links>]: the Eastern Wood-Pewee and the Blue-headed Vireo.

  When I got back, my neighbor said she was surprised I hadn't seen any bears, and quite honestly, that was something in the back of my mind the whole time we were up there also.

  On the other, it was just a little bit on the creepy side.  The road was only one-lane, and I had no way of knowing if there was anyone coming down the mountain.  There was a steep drop-off with no guard rails.  We've had quite a bit of rain in the past week, and today's weather was iffy for more.  I definitely did not want to get caught in a sudden thunderstorm up there, especially since no one really knew where I was (including me!).

  When I reached a point where I could safely turn around, I still wasn't at the top of the mountain, but the road in one direction was blocked by a fallen tree, and I wasn't sure where the other road would lead.  It had begun to feel like I was intruding on nature, and on the wildlife, just with the sound of my car crunching on the gravel and shale road.  It was time to go back down and go home.