Showing posts with label west virginia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label west virginia. Show all posts
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Tea it is.
A tweet from yesterday:
I look at her little face so contentedly eating that sticky treat, and my heart breaks a little inside. From happiness that she has never known what it means to not have anything to eat. From sadness that there are so many children in this country of excess who can't say the same thing. Through no fault of their own. With no understanding of politics or faltering economies. They know only one thing: they are hungry and there is nothing in the cupboards to eat. And so many of those empty, growling bellies are residing in my home state that my heart breaks all over again.
My friend Sarah is the executive director at Scott's Run Settlement House in Osage, WV. In a letter, she shared the following:
Reading of the struggles of my fellow West Virginians made me choke a bit on that expensive latte. So, I've decided that I am giving up my designer coffee habit for the summer and sending that money instead to Sarah at the Settlement House as they work to expand their Food Pantry services. $4 a cup x 4 times a week x 12 weeks in the summer = $192. Not a huge sum, but I am sure it can buy something far more nutritionally sound and needed than the 48 cups of coffee I would have used it for. And I should really be drinking tea anyway.
My friend Sarah is the executive director at Scott's Run Settlement House in Osage, WV. In a letter, she shared the following:
In a recent report from the US Department of Agriculture, the state of West Virginia was one of only two states that saw a significant increase in food insecurity--to be food insecure means to have limited or uncertain access to nutritionally adequate or safe foods. The national rate of food insecurity increased 19% from 2006-2009, in West Virginia, it increased a staggering 44%!
It is evident that your neighbors are suffering. Every June proves this as many parents who are dependent on the free meals their children receive at public school begin inundating the Food Pantry because they do not have the money to feed their children 3 meals a day for the entire summer.
Reading of the struggles of my fellow West Virginians made me choke a bit on that expensive latte. So, I've decided that I am giving up my designer coffee habit for the summer and sending that money instead to Sarah at the Settlement House as they work to expand their Food Pantry services. $4 a cup x 4 times a week x 12 weeks in the summer = $192. Not a huge sum, but I am sure it can buy something far more nutritionally sound and needed than the 48 cups of coffee I would have used it for. And I should really be drinking tea anyway.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
I want cake. And I want to eat it too.
During the NCAA basketball tournament, this great blog post was making the rounds of all of my Mountaineer Facebook friends' walls. It might be disguised as a sports piece, but it is in actuality a very succinct narrative on what it means to be a West Virginian. And now, here we are long after the final buzzer of March Madness has shrilled, and those written words are still resonating deep within me. You see, I am so very homesick. And no before you ask, I haven't abandoned my family or fled the country--I don't mean this home that I live in now. I know that outsiders may find it difficult to relate, but home to a born and bred West Virginian will always be in those hills no matter where we may physically reside. So when I say I'm homesick, I mean that I miss my mountain mama.
It goes beyond a simple longing for the winding country roads and pepperoni rolls. The longer I am gone, the more disconnected I feel from my roots. The affluent suburban mindset has all but eroded away the memory of a rural upbringing where poverty abounded, but so too did pride and a sense of belonging and community. And it makes me very sad, melancholy even, to think that this new reality of mine will continue to make me feel even further removed from my humble beginnings as each year passes.
I miss the girl that I was when home was, in fact, home. The slightly sassy, entirely nerdy girl who was going to go out and conquer the world completely unaware of just how blissfully naive and sheltered she was. The person buried somewhere within me who has since become over-shadowed by my roles as wife and mother. The one who had a future full of possibilities, but was too young and foolish to even recognize what a gift a wide open future really was.
Don't get me wrong. I have a great gig going here. It is not outside the realm of reason to say that I have led a charmed life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. While it is true that, depending on the decibel level of the sibling disputes occurring between Chase and Amaya at any given moment, I have been known to announce my plans to run away, that's just an empty threat. Well, as long as I remain able to take frequent Mamacations as the need presents itself anyway.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that my life is pretty much set now--the major decisions made, the possibilities narrowed. Which is the way life goes: as one takes on more responsibility the freedom to just up and join the Peace Corp on a whim diminishes. Opportunities that once existed, no longer do. They've been missed. Passed over. Traded for another option. Economics 101. Opportunity cost would have been a much more applicable concept to my life all those years ago if the professor would have put it in those terms rather than how it applied to IBM. Microchips mean very little to a 19 year old technology-phobe, after all.
There is a part of me that misses all of the variations of my life that could have been if I had chosen to go right instead of left at that fork in the road. I know that sounds silly to say that I miss something that never was, but I can't think of a better way to describe it--perhaps wistful? It's both a yearning and a sadness. Perhaps a mourning even. And yes, I know right now you're thinking one of those paths I should have chosen was a career in drama--believe me I know. Stupid limited resources and complete lack of stage presence.
Still, even though in my youth I did not fully comprehend that choosing one thing made the other an impossibility, I don't know that I would have changed any of the paths I ended up walking. Because it's not that I am willing to trade A for B, or even that I want to. It's that I want to somehow be able to live them both. I want to be a stay at home mom and an elementary school teacher. I want to spend a year in Florence learning to speak both Italian and Da Vinci, but still be home every night to make dinner for my family. Which is ridiculous and impossible. But absurd or not, it's what I've been longing for lately. To be split in two so that one part of me could be an always free Mountaineer running barefoot through those glorious hills while the other is a perfectly coiffed, suburban soccer mom sipping her Starbucks while chauffeuring her kids to play dates and music lessons.
That would be having it all though, wouldn't it?
And as they say, you just can't.
Doesn't mean I'll stop wanting it though.
Now please pass the cake.
It goes beyond a simple longing for the winding country roads and pepperoni rolls. The longer I am gone, the more disconnected I feel from my roots. The affluent suburban mindset has all but eroded away the memory of a rural upbringing where poverty abounded, but so too did pride and a sense of belonging and community. And it makes me very sad, melancholy even, to think that this new reality of mine will continue to make me feel even further removed from my humble beginnings as each year passes.
I miss the girl that I was when home was, in fact, home. The slightly sassy, entirely nerdy girl who was going to go out and conquer the world completely unaware of just how blissfully naive and sheltered she was. The person buried somewhere within me who has since become over-shadowed by my roles as wife and mother. The one who had a future full of possibilities, but was too young and foolish to even recognize what a gift a wide open future really was.
Don't get me wrong. I have a great gig going here. It is not outside the realm of reason to say that I have led a charmed life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. While it is true that, depending on the decibel level of the sibling disputes occurring between Chase and Amaya at any given moment, I have been known to announce my plans to run away, that's just an empty threat. Well, as long as I remain able to take frequent Mamacations as the need presents itself anyway.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that my life is pretty much set now--the major decisions made, the possibilities narrowed. Which is the way life goes: as one takes on more responsibility the freedom to just up and join the Peace Corp on a whim diminishes. Opportunities that once existed, no longer do. They've been missed. Passed over. Traded for another option. Economics 101. Opportunity cost would have been a much more applicable concept to my life all those years ago if the professor would have put it in those terms rather than how it applied to IBM. Microchips mean very little to a 19 year old technology-phobe, after all.
There is a part of me that misses all of the variations of my life that could have been if I had chosen to go right instead of left at that fork in the road. I know that sounds silly to say that I miss something that never was, but I can't think of a better way to describe it--perhaps wistful? It's both a yearning and a sadness. Perhaps a mourning even. And yes, I know right now you're thinking one of those paths I should have chosen was a career in drama--believe me I know. Stupid limited resources and complete lack of stage presence.
Still, even though in my youth I did not fully comprehend that choosing one thing made the other an impossibility, I don't know that I would have changed any of the paths I ended up walking. Because it's not that I am willing to trade A for B, or even that I want to. It's that I want to somehow be able to live them both. I want to be a stay at home mom and an elementary school teacher. I want to spend a year in Florence learning to speak both Italian and Da Vinci, but still be home every night to make dinner for my family. Which is ridiculous and impossible. But absurd or not, it's what I've been longing for lately. To be split in two so that one part of me could be an always free Mountaineer running barefoot through those glorious hills while the other is a perfectly coiffed, suburban soccer mom sipping her Starbucks while chauffeuring her kids to play dates and music lessons.
That would be having it all though, wouldn't it?
And as they say, you just can't.
Doesn't mean I'll stop wanting it though.
Now please pass the cake.
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