Re: Things to Come

As the photograph displayed on the sidebar of the blog claims, cold times are definitely ahead. The chillier days of autumn are pressing in on us, and as I type this the temperature is a mere 37 degrees Fahrenheit. The air is dry and people are gradually giving in to their winter apparel. A few flurries may be seen descending from above any day now.

Many people like me who are not fond of the cold may have a desire to move South -- anywhere South, really, as long as it's warmer. But of course the retired folk usually manage to buy up places down there, and residential areas are naturally going to be pricier there anyhow. So despite my dislike for cold, I probably won't get to be moving South anytime soon; it's when I force that fact onto myself that I'm a tad grateful for living in a place with definable seasons. Because I'm used to it. I'm going to be used to hazardous wintry roads and biting temperatures. I can't imagine it being the other way around: having to move from some nice Floridian paradise to somewhere in the mountains, completely unprepared for the colder days.

Driving on a snowy day once, my mother was frustrated by someone going exeedingly slow. The road conditions called for some caution, but this person was just overly paranoid. My mother said, "In the winter you can always tell who isn't from here."

And it's pretty true.

Taryn

Appalachian Contrast

It was fifth grade when I moved to West Virginia from Denver. The differences I immediately noticed were of the environment:

1.       There was so much more humidity.

2.       There were so many more trees.

3.       There were so many more hills.

I remember Denver’s winters being blizzard-ridden, cold, and dry. In as long as I’d lived in Denver, we’d only had one day off of school due to the snow, probably because of ease of transportation in a city built on flat terrain. Here, it’s so plagued with hills and curvy roads that a thin sheet of ice on the street is a life hazard in some parts of town, and the humidity here makes a lovely blinding veil of fog in the mornings. I was ecstatic when I’d had my first West Virginian snow day off from school—and almost awestruck when it lasted three consecutive days.

But in terms of the people, I didn’t notice much of a difference in the accents of West Virginians compared to the accents of those in Colorado, and even today when I visit Colorado I can’t pick out too many differences. But the people here—the feel here is much different to that of Denver. Even my Dad, who still lives in Colorado, commented on the people here when he was visiting. “People wave to you from their cars!” he’d marvel. “And they smile at you from the sidewalk!”  And it’s true, it’s an obvious difference between the two cities; Morgantown is a generally friendlier place than Denver. But another observation about Morgantown’s people is that the white and African American ratio is skewed. The African American population at my school is probably outnumbered by whites in a 50:1 ratio, in the most honest estimate I can provide. Whereas, in Colorado, the numbers are very different—for example, my fourth grade class (in the private school that I attended) had eight children in it, and from those eight children, four of them were African American and one was Hispanic.

I never really knew much about Appalachia until I’d moved here. The first time I'd heard the word, "Appalachia," was in my fourth grade class in Colorado. It was just a name then—the Appalachian Mountains, which, at that time, was just an inferior mountain range to the Rockies. Never had it occurred to me that Appalachia was a region until I’d visited it. Upon hearing that I’d be moving here, I had no idea that I was supposed to be expecting uneducated, moonshine-guzzling, overall-wearing gun-huggers in log cabins. Which sucks the fun out of it. Everybody visiting Appalachia should expect that :]

Haley