Tuesday, January 17, 2012

How the Faeries Got Me Back to WV - Part 4

For the next couple weeks back home in Asheville there were still many troubling thoughts about my future ... about what I would be doing next ... about home. I had just finished the months long process of editiing for my book, Song of the Forbidden Mountain in September of '01 and now here it was late May of '02 and I had no idea what would be next.I made my rounds of the coffehouses and cafes where I had spent so much time while writing and I visited the Earth Fare Store and spent hours looking at the looms and leather, the spinning wheels and carving tools.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on the times we'd had back in West Virginia, it had been home for a long time too, could it still be partly true? Then came the morning in early July that I was quietly sitting in Malaprop's sipping coffee and having another infamous Peanut Butter and Blackberry Jam toasted Croissant, still pondering the question of what was next and where exactly was home, when in walked Kimi Moore, a  muscian/writer and very good friend. He walked up behind, laid both hands on my shoulders, and out of the blue said, "Wild, it's the land that is calling you."

While home might be a question at times, there is only one place on earth where the land speaks to me,  to my very core. So I got up and walked down the sidewalk besides Malaprop's toward the parking garage and noticed that someone had spray painted "Go Home!!" on the side of the garage. We put our place up for sale in West Asheville, it sold within weeks and  by late August we were temporary residents at Super 8 in Summersville.

By mid September we'd signed a one year lease/purchase option on a store building in Richwood, the town where both Kate and I had been born and spent our early years, and had set up a bookstore. In the next ten months though about the customer that we had was one small child that loved horse stories and that Kate and I couldn't dare charge for the "chapter books," as she called them.

But three great things happened while we were there, and I list them in the order in which they happened.

Although there were no local book sales happening we met a local artist of marketry who also happened to be a book collector and former bookstore employee in eastern North Carolina. He had literally thousands of fine non-fiction books on about every subject imaginable and he was wanting to sell about half of them. In the process of listing his books online on a commission basis, and in addition to being able to add to our own collection of books, we formed an Amazon and AbeBooks online sale site and were shipping a goodly armload of books daily; enough to keep the lights on and beans on the table.

Second, we met "The Pammy." Pamela Z. Neal is barely five foot tall, is the closest model of a walking/talking faerie  I'd ever seen, she's beautiful and posseses the finest, sweetest spirit imaginable. And she can draw pictures practically beyond my ability to breathe while looking at them.

She came in one evening in late fall and in her quiet fae voice wanted a job. Even with the online shipping at the time we couldn't afford an employee but in the weeks to come we made a very good and lasting friend. By early spring we'd inherited a bookstore cat named Dicey from our college faring daughter, and when Pammy stopped next time to adore the cat, we were finally able to give her several months work, as well as Dicey, upon our closing the store.

The third thing that happened was I met the singers. I'd played bass in a group before and drums, but on the six string acoustic guitar, I was barely a rythymn player. A few standard chords was as far as I could go. There wasn't much happening at night in Richwood, so I'd lie down on a bed in the back of the store and lay a six string Yamaha across my chest and strum as much as I knew how.

And one night, I kept thinking I could hear singing in the background. And I'd asked Kate, who was writing up in the front of the store at the time if she was singing. And she'd say no. The music was literally out of this world, it was beautiful, and sounded to be a near all male chorous. I discovered that if I really relaxed I could take off playing right along with those songs and found myself going places on that guitar neck where I'd never been.

Stories and images began to form with those songs and different nights held different songs and moods and I noticed a story begin to unfold and that I could follow this story where ever it happened to lead, and still be lying in the back of the store.

Later I was to learn more about the faerie singers, the keepers of story from the beginning of time, but for now I believed that I'd found what we came back for, as I found that I could connect to these singers anywhere that I went with that guitar.

So after a lot of discussion about moving on, and whether to move back where we'd been (I seem to usually have this thing about only moving on, not back, lol) for whatever reason other than we'd never been there before, we loaded all the books in a U-Haul and with the little pick-up on a trailer behind, landed in Berea, KY.

Nice town, very cool college, stocked several more books, but not really possessing any feeling of "home"  for either of us. Still had the faeries singing, but I missed a lot of the things that were familiar to me, so after only three months there, we loaded a UHaul again, hauled all the books to a warehouse in Asheville, and the next year was pretty much a repeat of scenario above before we'd ever left Asheville the first time.

The faeries were singing and I was learning and taking notes like crazy, but that other thing was happening too ... 'Go Home!!"

Finally, leaving the book business in the care of a friend, we loaded up one more time. A writer friend in Summersville had a mother-in-law apartment on their house on Power Plant Road. We arrived one morning, began to unload and unpack, and way late that night, exhausted and sick, finally headed to bed.

And that night I had a dream .....did I ever have a dream .......

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