And finally I have re-found my coal town site, since while I quoted from it, I never bookmarked it. Which I will now remedy:

http://www.coalregion.com/


I kept looking for it off and on lately, and I thought of it again today when Barth mentioned town names (Shickshinny! Nanticoke! Wissahickon!), and also when Amanda announced that she too needs a mine fire story.

Tags: coal, company man
Current Music: Sufjan Stevens - Sister

You know how “Baby got back” starts? I’m sure you do, I mean, I called my mom and asked her, and she remembered, so I’m sure you do. “Oh my god, becky, would you look at the size of her butt”--rings a bell, right? So, yesterday I’m walking down to Park Street so I can go to my brother’s pre-Turkey party, and I pass a bench full of black teen-aged girls who seem to be harassing passersby--they said something to the older gentleman I passed a few steps before them that I didn’t quite catch, but I knew it was a heckle of some sorts. So I get up level with them, and one of them says (in a very loud voice, naturally) “Oh my god, Becky, would you look at the size of her bosoms.” I didn’t quite start laughing then, just waited until I was out of earshot, and called my mom (who now says I’ve ‘got front,’ thanks mum) because Andrea had rehearsal.

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I’m suddenly realizing that I have stories (okay, technically one now, and one in a couple of months) that qualify for reprint markets. I sent Wounds to Escape Pod, and though I usually avoid giving that many rejection details, they sent a very nice email in return, so I’m sharing it. (plus, you know, it’s actually a data point.)
“although it's an excellent story, and I enjoyed reading it, it's somewhat morbid for the experience we're trying to give our listeners.”

Which is actually very useful to know, though I still get surprised that other people think it’s morbid. She lives happily ever after, for heaven’s sake! I can’t remember what the rights deal with SH is, though I’m pretty sure they’d rather I didn’t sell it again before they print it. I’ll have to dig up my copy of the contract tomorrow and check, but even when I can try selling it around, I may skip this one. *That* story actually has a very sad ending, though i suppose the lack of cutting might make it less morbid. We’ll see.

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I was just futzing with numbers in my head for the coal fire story (formerly Company Man, but now back to being called “Finest Little Place.”), and realized that when I try to figure out things like when the fire was started, I use 1999 as the year the story is set in. I also just realized that the time I was using originally wouldn’t work so well since it would have put things squarely in the middle of WW2, and thus he wouldn’t have been home, he would have been off somewhere....oh, damn. I wonder if I just figured out the whys I’ve been missing.

Tags: coal

There is a tribe of groundhogs living in the hill behind our house, the hill that used to be the dump, back ages ago when this house was new. These two things are actually related.

Today we were doing yardwork, which mostly meant raking leaves up into huge damp piles and then throwing gasoline on them in the hopes that things will actually burn. That was my mom's job. Me, I built long piles of branches which I lit and then piled leaves on top of to dry up and eventually burn. This actually does work, it just takes a while. Our leaves were soaking wet in that pile, but I got about half of it burnt up, and most of the deadfalls from the winter. my mom also cleaned up her gardens, uncovering them all, just in time for me to go out tomorrow and cover them all up again, this time with pine branches. While I was still busy with my fire (oh, and horse! The neighbor stopped by on a walk with their dapple grey who is very nosy and also very mouthy, which I'm not as fond of in horses as in our Rottie.), my mom went to clear brush on the hill. The way our house works is there's our house, on the hill, and then behind it, a big dog pen (with the top part sectioned off as a garden), and behind that the hill slopes to a stop and drops into a very wet area. It would be drier if I dug out the drainage ditch, but I am weak, and wet dirt is the heavy. On the hillside used to be our strawberry bed, but that was long since overgrown, and the 4 white birches we planted the same year we moved here (more or less) and the pear tree over Tonka's grave, and the Cherry tree over Mollie's grave, and a heck of a lot of scrub stuff.

And the ground hog tunnels. The groundhogs dump everything they clear out of their tunnels outside the door, so all these holes have big piles of old cinders and slag and such. Looks as though the coal furnace this place used to have must have used the fine seed coal, not the big chunks like our stove used, cause the slag is very fine grain, not big clinkers like we had. And mixed in with the slag are all these bottles and jars and such. Lots are broken, especially the pottery chunks (some ugly ass china in with this stuff, let me tell you), but I found 14 whole little jars the size of....well, about two thirds the size of a coke can, height and width. Haven't a clue what they were for. And a Ponds jar, and two bottles, one maybe ketchup? and one that I think is a liquor bottle (on the back it has a 'not for resale/reuse' warning stamped in the glass. It's big and brown and used to have a paper label. It has a little circular medallion on the front where some other paper label must have been, and it's labeled 4/5 quart.) And here's the reall cool thing. they'd dump things at different times, of course. so there's layers of stuff and that's why one corner had about 20 of those little bottles (many partly broken) and various other glass all over the place because the (poor, with the bleeding feets) groundhogs hit a layer of bottles in between all the slag. But The slag was also dumped on top of the glass at one time, and it was just out of the furnace slag, because it mangled some of the bottles. Some are squashed from perfectly round into oval, and some are sort of bent in the middle, but the neatest one I found today is a little bitty bottle, probably half the size of the other little bottles, which is squashed flat and twisted, and not broken at all, and still has its cap on. Soo cool. Ugly as anything, and I'm not sure why I'm bothering to keep it and clean it up, but it's neat looking none the less. I think it must have been cracked in the process of the flattening and squashing, and then just healed up again when it cooled, but whatever was inside it is all dried on the sides, and looks very crackly, like those glazes and such, and the bottle is now at least reddish. Tomorrow when I finish cleaning it up, I'm going to see if I can tell what the lettering on it is, to see if I can tell what sort of a bottle it was. I love this sort of thing. The best part about the strawberry beds, other than the strawberries, was all the stuff we'd find in the dirt, but this is by far the coolest, at least that I remember (though I have a lovely little silver bell that I found somewhere out there as well. Okay, it's ugly as anything, but I like it, and I keep meaning to clean it up.)

Tags: coal, groundhogs

The grass outside the courthouse has been dying as long as you have lived here, and it cuts at your feet when you short cut across the yard to the steps( Read more... )

Tags: coal, company man