A Coal Miner's Daughter
I was startled to discover in my middle age that my grandfather had owned a coal mine in Utah. It was a rather small coal mine, comprised of one wide vein of black diamonds, mined by my grandfather, father and uncles as young men. Evidently it was the family income for a number of years. Then they hit a fault, the vein disappeared, and they searched the face in a number of feet in all directions. Probably a wider search than was safe. They never found the vein, and that was the end of mining. Grandpa before and after did many other things including farming, innkeeping and shipbuilding.
When I first came to West Virginia, I "kept company" for a couple of years with a former coal miner (disabled). He gave me a poster very similar to the picture above, though it was darker, and the wall was to the right, not the left, and the wall face was much bigger. His eyes would like up when he looked at the poster. It really broke his heart that he was no longer able to be a miner. I'd always thought of coal mining as a necessary, but unloved profession. What Michael made clear to me is that there are men who love it, with a love totally unreasonable (to my mind) ~~ with a pure passion. It is their choice, not a "job."
Today I am sending light to those men and their families, just a couple of counties over from mine. They'll need it. Join me, please.
8 comments:
♥My thoughts & prayers are with the miners & their families.♥
Though not in this country but in England, my materal Grandmothers Grandfather, his brothers,some of their children were coal miners, not because they wanted to be but because it was the only work they could get. Accordingly to family stories some were very young when they went into the mines, most died from black lung. My thoughts have been with the miners and their families, my heart and prayers are with them.
kheart
Sorry, can't even type or think today, not materal maternal. Also the coal miners were my maternal Grandfathers kin, not Grandmothers.
kheart
Sad news in WV.
I cannot imagine what the families and friends of loved ones lost must be feeling, thinking at first all was well only to learn it was not. Riding a rollercoaster of emotion. Bittersweet for the familes and friends of the one survivor. So sad.
kheart
♥s all to them, their loved ones, and to us, who care. . . .
My wife's uncle worked a little seam on his dairy farm near Uniontown PA and showed it to me 30 years ago when we first visited her relatives there. I couldn't believe anyone would do that between milkings,but he called it "something to do". He said some years it paid better than the milk.His father came to this country as a teenager to work in the mines. the false hope was a VERY cruel turn last night. sending love to WV.
Phil
There are some humans who just "have" to interact physically with the natural environment. The spouse is absolutely obsessed with digging and moving earth and large boulders of granite. Nothing gives him more pleasure. Perhaps he got it from his mother. I'll never forget when she came to visit, shortly before her death from cancer, her enthusiasm for our black soil and the loving way she let it pass through her fingers. That people love rocks and dirt may be hard to understand, but it's a fact.
Maybe there's something atavistic. I look at our mongrel who's part terrior and am struck by the enthusiasm with which she digs in the dirt and absolutely hates water. And then I consider that there are some children who glory in getting their hands into the mud and other's who avoid "dirt" like the plague. It may just be that some nerve-endings respond positively to dirt and others don't.
Being down in a mine must be a very special experience. I think of the humans that first went into the caves in France, experienced the extinction of all input to their sense of sight, and then went back with a light source in order to record what they had remembered while they were in the dark. Considering how much humans depend on the sense of sight for their source of conscious information, the experience of total darkness must have been impressive.
hannah
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