Joe had some days off last week, so we drove 4 1/2 hrs away to WV, where I was born & raised. (Well, we lived in WV, but commuted to NC a lot for Dad's work, so we had the best of both worlds.) Joe's parents (evangelists) were holding a revival meeting in Beckley, so we got to see them - our main goal - but we also spent part of a day traveling around my old stomping grounds, which I've been wanting to do for a while now. I was actually surprised at how little had changed. I guess my home-town isn't exactly a booming metropolis. =) The pictures above are of the cabin that we used to live in. My dad & and mom (with help from my grandparents) built it entirely with their own hands. They cut all the poplar trees on the hills behind the house and peeled the bark off them before having them cut in half. All the stones for the fireplaces were gathered from the beautiful little creek which you can see from the back deck. If ever you wanted to see a home built with blood, sweat and tears, it was probably this one! It's original purpose was to be a hunting cabin, but they kept adding on until it became quite a nice sized house that we lived in for many years. Dad also built the barn (of course) and we used to stack our firewood there. I actually enjoyed that job, and never minded taking the wheelbarrow up there (even in the snow) to get wood for the stove, seeing how much I could stack on it without having it topple over on the way back to the house. (Art, in it's finest form!) I loved growing up at the cabin, and have only fond memories of our mountain life there. It was great to see it again, and I was very relieved that it still looks pretty much the same. The pictures aren't that great, but we just took them while driving by on the road. Well, we always called it a road - it WAS paved, after all - but many of our visiting friends thought it was more of a one-lane "mountain on your left, drop-off on your right" path of death. But they always survived.
