The view coming over the mountains from West Virginia, through Beckley, across the western tip of Virginia and into North Carolina is breath taking. It’s worth the drive even though I have no one to share it with. Tom, my OB/Gyn husband, has to stay at home to man the fort at our Women’s Health Practice and most of my friends work. I stop just south of the crest and pull off on the berm somewhere past Fancy Gap but before Jonesville to stare down at the green valley spreading wide and fertile before me. West Virginia has mountains, ridge after ridge, but nothing like this sudden wide-open space. Soon, I am passing sunset reflected silver water, along a ten-lane freeway with semi-trucks on either side and longing for the two and four-lane highways of home. It is almost dusk…
I’m on a book tour, heading toward Charlotte, for my second book, Arms Wide Open: A Midwife’s Memoir, published by Beacon and released just five days ago. This one goes back to the hippie, homesteading, homebirth days, then fast-forwards to now, a midwife’s story of innocence, survival and hope. I tour not for myself, (the remuneration for authors, unless you’re famous isn’t that great these days). It’s for
women, and families and for midwifery that I speak; for idealists, everywhere, who think there has to be a way for this trouble world to survive. By nine, it is dark and after thirty minutes, lost in the suburbs of Charlotte, I finally pull into an EconoLodge on Clanton Road just off 77. It’s not my preferred motel chain, but it’s cheap and clean, $49.00 a night. I pull on my pajamas, hop into my king size bed and grab my cell phone. “Tom,” I say when my husband answers. “I made it….”
I’m on a book tour, heading toward Charlotte, for my second book, Arms Wide Open: A Midwife’s Memoir, published by Beacon and released just five days ago. This one goes back to the hippie, homesteading, homebirth days, then fast-forwards to now, a midwife’s story of innocence, survival and hope. I tour not for myself, (the remuneration for authors, unless you’re famous isn’t that great these days). It’s for
women, and families and for midwifery that I speak; for idealists, everywhere, who think there has to be a way for this trouble world to survive. By nine, it is dark and after thirty minutes, lost in the suburbs of Charlotte, I finally pull into an EconoLodge on Clanton Road just off 77. It’s not my preferred motel chain, but it’s cheap and clean, $49.00 a night. I pull on my pajamas, hop into my king size bed and grab my cell phone. “Tom,” I say when my husband answers. “I made it….”