Springtime energizes my senses. I love how it brings needed spice after the bland taste of winter. The once silent nights are now filled with the trills of spring peepers and the days are harmonious with the chirps of birds. The dead-leaf smell mixed with cold air has been replaced with an earthy spring smell of fresh green growth.  The once dry and brittle woods are now spongy with new grass and moss. However, my most favorite transformation is the burst of color that spring brings. The purple crocuses contrast the yellow daffodils, which also highlighted by the green grass. The colors are a refreshing break from the dull drab colors of winter.

These bursts of color appear in the oddest places and even highlight the past. Driving along, I love to take in the scenery. I noticed the clusters of flowers in the spring that sprout in places with no driveways and no homes nearby. I noticed large clusters of flowers blooming along the creek in spots that were not accessible by any road. My husband said these flowers, although they appeared oddly placed, marked where houses once stood and people once lived. This got me thinking. Someone had to plant them.

I then wondered if the people who planted the flowers would know that those plants were the only legacy of the place they once lived. I wondered what plant I would want to stay in my memory long after I’ve died and my house crumbled back to the dirt.  Maybe it would be a raspberry patch. It is a sweet plant with big enough thorns to bite back. Maybe it would be a hyacinth. It is fragrant, vibrantly-colored, yet short-lived. In reality it would probably be ramps.

Most people either love ramps or hate them. There is no middle ground, no gray area. No matter whether you love or hate them, you must agree that ramps have certain positive qualities.  They are hearty, smelly, strong, and healthy for the body. They also show up at the same time every year, but only stay a short time. In addition to all that, they are one of the strongest and first spring smells.

Springtime is overflowing with robust smells. It’s easy to catch a whiff of the scent of growing grass, budding trees and shrubs, and ramps and spring onions. After a few weeks of warmth and sun, new plants are just the perfect texture to gather and throw into a pot for dinner.

My husband knows a variety of edible spring greens. These greens usually include ramps, poke, milkweed, and nettles.  The fact that he goes out into our yard and picks “West Virginia Collard Greens” is mind-blowing to me. I am so used to getting my food from a store or restaurant that it’s amazing to me that I can get at least some of my food from the backyard. Unlike my garden, this salad takes little work. No digging. No weeding. No planting. Welcome spring!

 Suggestions for our City Girl Transplant? Feel free to share at zoezolt@gmail.com.

There was a time when just about everyone lived on a two-lane, one lane, or no lane road in rural West Virginia.  For the most part, this lack of congestion made life a bit  simpler.  Everyone had a little more elbow room and there were fewer causes for conflict among neighbors. But semi-isolated living was not without its problems.  Everyone could let their chickens and dogs roam free.  Chicken freedom did not cause any problems, but free roaming dogs could cause some grief.  The chickens always came home to roost but that was not always the case with dogs.

Down along the beautiful Elk River where I spent my youth, stray dogs were a fact of life.  Oftentimes, when they inadvertently encroached on the turf of your dogs, fights would occur.  The fights were usually brief.  Harmless shots would occasionally ring out from the porches of the home turf dogs. They were not lethal shots.  They were just designed to scare away the intruders.

But the appearance of stray dogs did not always end happily. Some of them like to chase the chickens or tree cats.  When that kind of behavior occurred, the shots became very unfriendly, sometimes resulting in the death of a dog.  Relationships between neighbors could sometimes get ugly when someone shot a dog.

     But my favorite kind of stray dog was the one who just showed up and ate whatever was available around your place, then harmlessly parked himself on your porch and took a nap.  He was not a troublemaker.  He was just a drifter.  When the homeowner came out to investigate, the dog would just wag his tail and come to be petted.  The problem then became, “what do I do with this critter?”  If you didn’t know the dog, or have any idea where he came from, you had a problem.  No one wanted to shoot a friendly dog, so oftentimes, the pooch just became a resident.

A few weeks ago, even in 2012, such a critter showed up at my house.  He was a puppy, probably put out of a car somewhere nearby.  He just showed up one night, ate all of the cat food on the porch, climbed up into a lounge chair, and waited for me to get up.  When I went out the next morning he greeted me with a waggy tail and big, inviting brown eyes.  He was a beautiful puppy, healthy looking, and, for a puppy, well behaved.

Even though he struck fear and trembling into my two cats, he had no intention of harming them.  He just wanted to play.

Even though he was probably less than six months old, he was a BIG dog.  He had huge feet and weighed around 25 pounds.  Despite all of his charms, he presented a major problem for me. I like dogs, but my life as an itinerant musician and dancer does not lend itself to being a dog owner.  That’s why I have cats.  I can leave them for a few days and they survive just fine.  They’ve been with me fourteen years.

I realized very soon that I needed to get rid of the puppy quickly because he and I were about to bond.  He was a very good puppy, the kind of puppy that will attach itself to you in a very short time.  So, even though it was a difficult thing to do, I had to take him to a shelter.  The ladies at the Braxton Animal Shelter assured me that they would have no trouble finding a home for such a beautiful and friendly puppy.

This was not the first time some absolutely rotten person has “set a dog out” on my road.  I’m sure it looks like a safe place to deposit an unwanted pet.  But I can’t think of anything more low down than throwing a poor dog out to fend for himself in the woods.

Mack Samples is a writer and musician who lives in Clay County. Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

It’s taken a few years, but my body has finally adjusted to country time. When I lived in the city, I was a night owl. I stayed up late, slept in, and thought 8 a.m. was early. In the country I am forced to adapt to my surroundings and actually wake up with the sun.

My husband was the first key to my sleeping transformation. He went to bed at 9 p.m. and woke up between 4 and 5 a.m. At first, my body failed to function that early, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I refused to comply. I needed at least 3 hours more sleep or else I was not fun to be around.

Unfortunately, early to rise for my husband also meant early to bed. I resisted the time change for a long time. When the clock struck 9 p.m., I would dread bed. My husband would fall fast asleep. There I would lie awake, thinking about all the things I used to do when I lived alone as a night owl. After 9 p.m. was the best time to surf the Internet, read a book, play a computer game, write a story, or sometimes I would even pull out an exercise video.

With no computer and the fear of waking up my husband, the only activity I could still do was to read a book and read I did. I read for hours trying to make myself fall asleep. I finally began to bring my books to bed and read. With a bed lamp I satisfied my night owl by reading myself to sleep.

It’s easier to go to bed early that it is to get up early. Getting up early has been a challenge for me my whole life. My mom is a night owl and my father starts his day between 3-4 a.m. My dad has always started his mornings bright and early. The alarm would go off and he would jump out of bed, never using the snooze button. This is the opposite of me. I love the snooze button. Some days I would set the alarm an hour before I had to get up and hit the snooze button until it was time to get up. This worked when I was single but apparently a snooze button that continually goes off can get kind of annoying. Imagine that!

This became the beginning of the end for my sleep pattern. My husband would tell me, “Why don’t you just get up?” I resisted until the day my daughter was born. She forced me to finally break my habit. We co-sleep and initially, I woke up to tears every morning, but as she has grown older she has changed her ways of waking me up.  Now, at 18 months, she uses cuteness. In a gentle, loving way she pets my face. Then she jumps on my side and leans over my face slowly creeping until she finds my lips. She tenderly holds my face and gives me a sweet, soft kiss. Now that’s a wake- up call I can handle.  It beats the snooze button every time.

 Suggestions for our City Girl Transplant? Feel free to share at zoezolt@gmail.com.

One of the current best selling books, a novel by Kathryn Stockett entitled The Help has been the conversation piece in several social settings of which I have been a part in recent months. It first came to my attention at a ballroom dance that my wife and I were attending in Indianapolis back in July. Our tablemates were from Mississippi and were quite well-to-do. They were very interested in the book because they still had help at their house, provided by African-Americans. Since that time the book has come up in several locations where I have found myself. I have not read the book, but my wife is currently in the process of doing so. At any rate, all of the talk about domestic help set me to thinking about the help that I observed when I was growing up in post World War II rural West Virginia.

I actually knew people who had domestic help. But they were not called maids or servants. Everyone referred to them as “hired girls.” As a matter of fact, my closest neighbor had a hired girl.

The first thing I remember about rural West Virginia hired girls is that they were all white. That was not a surprising fact in my neck of the woods because the nearest black person was some thirty miles away.

There were actually two kinds of hired girls in the world that I knew. Some of them were just part-time and were hired during the peak canning season, or oftentimes during spring cleaning. Most modern folks don’t know about spring cleaning but it was a major deal back in earlier days. Every room in the house received a total cleaning. All of the furniture was moved out, walls and ceilings were washed down (sometimes painted), and the hardwood floors were thoroughly cleaned and oftentimes got a new coat of varnish.

I have vivid memories of wrestling mattresses out of the house each spring and placing them on sawhorses in the yard where they could sun all day while the room was being cleaned. Spring cleaning was difficult work. A hired girl was a handy thing to have. But these part-timers usually moved in for a couple of weeks and became a part of the household.

Some hired girls that I knew were full time. They were often brought in when the lady of the house was getting older or was in poor health. These girls became a part of the family. They did not live in servant’s quarters and were treated as equals in every way. They sat at the supper table with everyone else and shared the living room and parlor during the evenings.

I am sure that the pay was not much because most folks who hired them were not wealthy. But the families provided free room and board and a small stipend.

Who were these girls anyway? Why would they want to be hired girls? Most usually they were young women who quit high school and had not yet found their way in the world. Others were middle years ladies who had lost their husbands, or perhaps, never found one in the first place.

But, actually, they enjoyed a pretty good life. They had a nice clean place to live, sat down to good meals everyday, and enjoyed the community social life. I saw men come a-court’n some of them.

I don’t think any hired girls I knew ever thought of themselves as being inferior or felt discriminated against. Of course in the pre-1960′s south, where the novel is based, race was still a sensitive issue and I am sure it had something to do with the way the help was treated. On the other hand, when you think of earlier times in merry old England, the hired help there was usually white and certainly did not get treated as equals.

Hired girls as I knew them might well have been a hill country phenomenon.

Mack Samples is a writer and musician who lives in Clay County. Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

Click Here to download  Two-Lane Livin Magazine — April 2012 Edition for only 50 cents!.

I looked in my old Webster’s New World Dictionary (copyright 1957), my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (copyright 2003), and, finally, I typed the word into my internet prompt line.  But none of them showed a trace of the word footlog.  So I concluded from that search that all of the walking world except certain parts of Appalachia don’t know how to get across the creek without getting their feet wet.

Back in the day, when everyone walked just about everywhere they went around this part of the country, footlogs were a very common sight.  They served a very essential purpose.  Many times when your destination required crossing creeks, you would encountered a problem as you approached little streams.  In the first place, the creek banks were often very steep.  The steep banks were the result of many centuries of erosion.  If a person had on their Sunday-go-to-meeting-shoes, just getting down to the creek itself could destroy his (or her) personal appearance when they got to church.  And then, sometimes, the creeks were running high and you could not get across them at all.

Footlogs were a very common sight as I was growing up.  Sometimes they were very crude.  Someone would just saw down a rather large tree, cut all the limbs off it and secure each end of it on both sides of the creek.  They would usually dig a little trench for each end of the log to rest in so it wouldn’t wiggle when someone put their weight on it. Such a footlog was very common if the creek banks were very narrow and it only took a few steps to get across.

But if the banks were widely separated, it was sometimes quite a task to construct a footlog.  I can recall watching men haul the log to one side of the creek with a horse, hook a couple of log chains to it, then take the horse to the other side and snake the other end of the log up to where they could place it securely.  It was no easy task.  In addition, if the span was pretty wide, they would usually hew off one side of the log to make it more or less level.  I can recall a couple of my aunts crossing a footlog in high heeled shoes as they walked to church.  This particular footlog consisted of two logs, side by side, both hewed off on one side. That allowed for a pretty smooth crossing.

As we all know, it was a custom among all of the older generation Appalachians to take something that was designed to be practical and make it a work of art.  Quilts are a classic example of that.  The quilt’s purpose was to keep a person warm, but many of them were created to be beautiful as well as practical.  I saw the same thing happen with footlogs.  Some of them became works of art.

I remember one in particular that was constructed by one of my distant neighbors.  It consisted of two logs, placed snuggly side by side, and both were nicely hued off on one side with a broad ax.  He fashioned nice hand rails on each side and put a little arch entryway on each end.  I have searched in vain for a picture of it but to no avail.

As I searched for the word footlog in dictionaries and internet sites I was again reminded that all of the people in the world who think they are so smart and know everything don’t know squat about how to make do with what you’ve got and to make something pretty in the process.

Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County. Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

Retirement is not what you might think.  When you envision retirement, do you think of long lazy days walking on white sand beaches, or reading a book while lounging in a porch swing, or sleeping late and getting up to leisurely breakfasts on the deck? It might work that way for some people but my experience so far is a long way from those idyllic scenes.

That doesn’t mean it’s been bad. It has been full of variety, interesting people and places and things to do. We get up early to beat the heat and work in the gardens until the sun drives us indoors. We watch birds during work breaks and eat good healthy lunches. I even get to cook-homemade bread, yogurt, mayonnaise, and other good things grace our table daily. Jams and jellies and other good foods are filling the cellar and the occasional pie shows upon our plates too. I also get to work in my flower and herb gardens. Herbs are drying, lavender wands hang in my closets (which are slowly getting de-cluttered) and fresh flowers scent the kitchen. It’s a good life that takes hard work and commitment to maintain, but it’s worth the effort.

When I planned to retire in May, I ramped up my efforts to schedule storytelling work as a supplement to my retirement income. The summer is filled with programs, and what could be better than doing something you love? I am scheduling the fall months now with an eye to leaving plenty of room for writing this winter. Projects swirl in my mind-research on intriguing bits of West Virginia history, interviews with people who might not be famous but have important experiences to share, poetry and fiction and children’s books that languish on my computer because I have not had time to edit and polish them for submission to publishers.

There are some downsides to retirement, of course. Like health insurance that will consume almost half of our retirement income, and yet can we dare to live without it? Learning to live on a much reduced income is a challenge. I figured and figured to be sure this could work, but I know that one big emergency could cause real problems. It is a gamble, one I am ready to take in the interest of improving the quality of my life.

That may sound odd-that I thought living on a reduced income would improve the quality of my life-but it is true. Driving over 100 miles to work, being away from home over half of the hours in each workday and trying to squeeze what was really important to me (family, home, writing, storytelling) into the few waking hours I had left  became draining on my spirit and energy. It was time for a change.

As the months pass, we will see just how retirement will work. Will we be able to make ends meet? I feel sure we can as we have always been frugal and fairly self-sufficient, producing most of our food, heat and other needs. Will I get bored by so much time on my hands? It does not seem remotely possible. Will retirement prove to be our next great adventure? I am positive it will.

A professional storyteller, Granny Sue has several published works, available at http://www.grannysu.blogspot.com.

This time of year many animals are raising their young. The young animals are most vulnerable during this season. One such animal is the snapping turtle. I never thought I would have a turtle as a pet, but this turtle almost met his fate if it weren’t for us. One early summer day, our neighbor and my husband came across a snapping turtle that was just slightly bigger than a quarter. Our neighbor feared that his small dog would be harmed by the turtle in the near or not so near future. Therefore, he was going to kill the turtle before it bit his dog. Instead, my husband asked to take the turtle home.

At first, he lived in a glass bowl eating a diet of bologna. However, as the bologna polluted his water, we decided to transport him to a fish tank and feed him a more familiar diet. Into the creek we went to catch crawdads, minnows, and small insects. My husband asked his 10-year-old daughter to come up with a name. Snappy quickly became the entertainment in our home. He was so small, so fragile, and so helpless in his early days.

As weeks progressed, so did Snappy’s size. He went from no bigger than a quarter, to larger than a coffee cup saucer in about a year. This was the result of many factors, including a healthy diet of crayfish, minnows, and turtle pellets, which we affectionately named Snappy Sticks.  Snappy acted as most turtles do… slowly. He premeditated every move. This occurred either because of his tortoise heritage or pure laziness. Snappy did not snap at something unless he was ready to strike and eat it. He would sit there for hours only dipping his head above water every so often to catch a breath of oxygen. He had placed himself in the tank in such a way that the least amount of energy was required to break the surface for some fresh air. He usually killed out of necessity, living alongside his prey of minnows and crawdads.

My two step children, ages 10 and 15, would watch Snappy for hours. They chose to watch Snappy instead of TV. Snappy didn’t disappoint either. One had to stare at the tank waiting for him to strike at the craw crabs and minnows swimming with him. The harmony between predator and prey continued until the day he chose to eat his tank mates.

Snappy’s patience with hunting took a deadly turn when we moved into our house. His tank was moved and placed at the front door while we prepared a spot for him inside. Snappy’s tank buddies were removed and turned back to the creek.  Snappy, at this time, had reached the size of small dinner plate and his instinctual carnivore ancestry reared its ugly head.

Following two weeks of solitary confinement in a bucket outside, we put Snappy back into his tank. We also provided him with about 20 tank mates; many of the minnows were much bigger than he normally ate. We figured Snappy would be set for food for the next month. However, Snappy surprised us. Snappy went on a feeding frenzy. He started killing off his mates, quickly. At one point he had two fish by the tail, mortally wounded and trying to swim from him. Snappy turned dark that day and killed way more than he could eat. The next day, carnage from his rampage floated in the tank. He killed every living thing in the tank. Snappy taught us an important lesson that day. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. So we returned him to his creek home.

Suggestions for our City Girl Transplant? Feel free to share at zoezolt@gmail.com.