Belated

  It has been a while since I have posted here. For one thing, I have been out of town in Floyd, VA, where my husband's elderly parents make their home.
  His mother is not well, and he went to see what needed to be done and when it is likely to need doing. His parents manage quite well, despite their age and the size of the house, etc., but it is clear that they need R's help. He has been chopping scads of wood for the winter, cleaning up, shopping, and has eye on larger jobs that will need doing.
Despite the fact that I cared for my parents for 5 years before their death (though I didn't live with them, and they had 24 hour a day care), I am not terribly useful here. I don't do the kind of cooking, cleaning, or domestic work that would require doing. They don't need the sort of help (trips to the doctor, banking, clothes shopping and the like) that my parents required. There is no place to take them for entertainment out
here in the boonies, and they aren't interested anyhow.
The town of Floyd has changed enormously since I was last here, about 4 years ago. Then, it was beginning to pick up a little bit of tourist traffic because of the Friday night music Jamboree, local musicians gathering to play on every corner and on the stage at the Country Store. This was even publicized on NPR.
There had always been a hippy sort of vibe here, way past the heyday of that time, and I knew there were co-ops, artists' communes, and the like tucked back in the hills. But now the downtown is crowded every weekend with traffic. There is a radio program here (I haven't heard it yet) to send all the vagrant picking and singing out over the wires. Movies use the town as a location, etc.
It still isn't my ideal for a place to live because I am a city girl, who practices a relatively obscure form of yoga and Judaism, enjoys ethnic food, and wants to see the latest movies. But it's interesting to visit and to contemplate the way it used to be when almost the only stores to be found downtown sold farming implements and bibles.
It has been fun. We have gone to a family reunion with many far flung relatives I had never met. We spent an interesting afternoon and evening sitting by a pond in the growing darkness watching the fireflies I have missed seeing for all of these years and chatting with an 12 year old about going to middle school.
Soon I will be on my way home again to the other end of the continent.