Fifteen million dollars will be shelled out this month in a national attempt show our love to each other; stuffed animals, chocolate, perfume, chocolate, flowers…and did I mention chocolate? Oh yes, and cards filled with mushy words…

Please bear with me as I express my words of devotion not to an individual person, but to a place. Even though my love letter is personal and specific to Hacker Valley and Red Gate Farm, I believe it reflects sentiment most West Virginians feel towards their own special place.  (The first line is borrowed from Elizabeth Browning.)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1.  I love that you don’t get in a hurry. The morning sun takes its time coming down the hill after it tops over the ridge letting the frost linger in the shadows and  fallen leaves that it’s outlined.

2.  I treasure the vivid backdrop you paint for my childhood memories and those of my parents. For example, fifty yards from the front door I can stand in the cool waters of the Holly River and laugh as I imagine my mom and her sister as youngsters involuntarily baptizing all their hens. (As the hens would willingly crouch down for the rooster, mom and auntie would pluck them up, run out the door of the chicken house “of ill repute”, and dunk them under the “cleansing” waters of the Holly.)

3.  I am mesmerized by the wind currents swirling around and through the mountains. Once in the hayfield on Balli Mountain, the clouds, being encouraged along on a blessed breeze, cast shadows that washed over us like waves in the ocean. The only appropriate response was to stop raking and catch my breath only to have it taken away again in awe.

4.  I love the exhilaration of riding dirt bikes in the meadow under a blue sky, or catching spring peepers in the ditch. You enable me, for just a few moments, to step outside my role of housewife and mom and be a kid again.

5.  In addition to the usual flora and fauna like dandelions and black bears, you go the extra mile and give us wine berries, ramps, doodle-bugs, and ferrydiddles. Oh, and there is a marvelous patch of touch-me-knots on Sleepy Pugh Hill that means more to me than a dozen roses.

6.  You are a marvelous teacher who encourages us to think outside the box to fix things, which I’m impressed to say nine times out of ten involve duct tape.

7.  I love to go barefoot and feel the mud between my toes more than a pedicure! And the mudslide behind the house that my ten year old son discovered was marvelous.  He slid down on his belly repeatedly and we had to hose him off with the garden hose.

8.  Thanks for challenging me. There are endless opportunities there to push oneself beyond what you think you can do…cutting briars (filth) with a heavy gas-powered weed eater for five hours till your side bruises…or putting up hay as temperatures soar into the 90’s–physical challenges that when met builds confidence as well as character.

9.  I think it’s cool that a traffic jam is when a tree falls across the road until someone comes along with a chain-saw in their trunk (sooner than you might think).

10.  Night is so truly defined you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. When the moon is full the entire valley is illuminated so barns and trees cast purple shadows. Looking up at the starry sky makes me humble.

After 44 years together, I appreciate you now more than ever. Happy Valentine’s Day to Red Gate Farm and the special people who live there. My heart aches when we are far apart—for it is with you that my heart sings the prettiest love song.

I miss you, Janet

    Janet Fliegel is a WV farmgirl currently surviving in a suburb of Cincinnati. 

As February rolls around we are all reminded that it is time to tell someone that we love them. The reminder can take several forms. Some folks just use the spoken word, some present a box of candy with fancy wrapping, some find just the right card, while others shower the special one with roses. Valentine’s Day is a very joyous time for those who love each other. Not so much when love is one-sided. Unrequited love is an undisputed fact. During the course of human history, it has caused a multitude of problems.

A large percentage of the old folk songs and ballads that have been passed down for generations, many of them from the old European countries, carry the theme of love gone wrong. In most cases unrequited love involves a man who loves a woman but she is unresponsive to his advances.

For most men such an incident just involves getting over the rejection. They just go have a couple of beers, shrug it off, and look for someone else in the next town. But the old folk ballads tell stories of men who couldn’t tolerate their damaged egos so they took some sort of tragic action. Sometimes, they murder the object of their affection and either go to prison or are hanged. Other times, they just kill themselves because they can’t stand the pain. But oftentimes they murder the girl and then kill themselves.

In the grandmother of all the folksongs, Barbara Allen, the poor guy misunderstands Barbara’s response to his advances and kills himself. When she finds out about it, she takes to her bed and dies. In Wexford Girl, from roughly the same era in England, the rejected guy beats the poor girl to death with a club and throws her in the river, “that flows through Wexford town.” In the American annals of tragic romances a song called When First I Came to Louisville tells the story of a young man who kills the man who is beating his time and is subsequently hanged.

If you have read this far you have probably concluded that I am writing about ancient history and that things like this don’t happen in modern times. Don’t you believe it!  Unrequited love that leads to tragedy is still very much with us. I can recall several such incidents that have occurred in central West Virginia during the past ten years. I remember one man who confessed to killing his ex-wife and remarked, “if I can’t have her, nobody else can either.”

When I think about love, I always think of a professor I had at Ohio University. In one of his lectures, he was talking about what causes serious problems in a civilized society. He said, “over half of the social problems that lead to crime in a civilized society boils down to one thing.  John loves Mary. Mary does not love John.”

I have never personally known any man who committed murder or suicide over a lost love, but I have read about some who lived pretty close to me. Love is a very strong emotion and can cause both good and bad things to happen. I think old Marty Robins pretty much nailed it in his song Don’t Worry Bout Me back about 1960 with these two lines:

Love can’t be explained, can’t be controlled
      One day it’s warm, next day it’s cold

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.