Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in Emporium, Pennsylvania, a small town in the heart of the endless mountains, where there are more deer and bear than there are people.
It was a very normal thing, in the late 1950's and early 1960's for her family to drive on dirt roads in the woods, at dusk and shine a bright light into the wilderness to see how many deer they could find. Everybody did it.
The little girl and many neighborhood friends would sometimes stand along side a huge bear hanging by it's legs, many feet off the ground, at the game warden's place, for pictures. She once cuddled an abandoned bear cub who was only a few weeks old.
Heck, that was nothing. The game warden also brought 5 or 6 rattlesnakes to her church day camp as an exhibition. You could see the lumps on his hands where he had been bitten by rattlers once or twice. It was so cool.
Some days she would visit her grandparent's house, next to the railroad tracks in town, and smell the aroma of sassafras, as her grandfather sat on the back porch to make sassafras tea, from roots he collected in the woods that day. Sassafras is a lot like rootbeer.
Some days Poppy came home from hunting, while still dressed in his orange hunting clothes, holding a turkey by the feet with its huge wings spread out, as if trying to fly upside down.
When she was eleven or twelve, she joined the Sylvania Rifle Club and learned to shoot a .22 rifle at the range, up Plank Road Hollow. That's where she got her little trophy for marksmanship. She went hunting at 14, with the preacher and her dad, and shot a deer. But, when she got home with it, her kid sister called her a murderer and she never went hunting again.
That is when her world began to change.
She graduated from high school, taught Bible School for a few weeks on an Indian Reservation in Middle Verde, AZ. She worked at the court house, met a Marine from Wisconsin, got married, adopted a dog and a cat, went through years of infertility, adopted 2 girls and wrote an article about the adoption triad for a local magazine.
Right after that, late one night, a drunk driver hit her thirty-seven year old husband of fifteen years, while he walked alone a country road. She grew up immediately and became a caregiver to her brain injured husband. The little girl became the woman-of-the-house at thirty-five years old, while she raised two girls, aged 3 and 9, at the time.
This girl - now woman - from Emporium, went on day by day, trying the best she knew-how, to get along in life, with life and in spite of life. After a time, she got very tired and emotionally drained. She wasn't in Emporium any more, Toto.
Eleven long years passed with full time work, frequent visits to the doctors, mobile therapists, psychologists, raising two wonderful daughters, parent teacher appointments at school and trying to stay away from angry outbursts directed at her from the new personality of the man who now occupied her husband's body. There was a dirty house that she never had time to clean, tears in her bedroom, so no one would see her cry and putting up a good front to her extended family and church family. She tried to stay content but inside she was tormented.
She worked at a full time job and was laid off because of the number of times she came to work late, in tears and the number of doctor appointments she had to attend. Her boss said that she was bringing down the morale of the office. She was living this life 24x7, but even her own psychologist admitted that 20 hours a week of seeing patients was all he could stand. She was up against the proverbial rock and a hard place.
The house that the family lived in for twenty-six years was sold so that the bank would not go through with foreclosure and they moved to a house that was cold and unfamiliar, just in time for her older daughter to graduate high school and go in to the Army.
Her depression grew and, unlike the old song her Mom used to sing, "the grey skies would not clear up". She wanted to go back to Emporium.
But, you can't start all over again, can you?
Somewhere, somehow, there had to be a place where she could recover the peace that she knew while growing up in her hometown, but financially she had to earn enough money to support herself and her younger daughter who was now a teenager.
She took off her wedding ring, put on her CCHS class ring to cover the twenty-six year divot in her ring finger, and ran away again. This time to the city.
She worked at a store called Nordstrom's in Tyson's Corner, VA. While she had never even heard of this store, she soon found out that it was a bit "hoity-toity". She was selling tank tops for $50 each! That was unheard of in Emporium.
This woman from Emporium was good at customer service and many of her wealthy customers said, "Now, sweetie, never let the city take the sweetness out of you". That sounded sort of like what people wrote in her CCHS 1971 class yearbook the year she graduated. Maybe she had held on to that character from Emporium.
Some days she floundered and some days she was on top of the world, but all the while, she remembered her sweet hometown, her grandparents, her Mom and Dad and her two younger sisters.
She held on to hope and her purpose in life because of the character and roots that where established in those early years in Emporium.
Fast forward to 2019... Some nights, when the darkness prevails, sad memories overflow from my eyes, as tears, and I can easily lament all the pain and hardship that life held. But I snap out of it when I dream about that little girl's early life and the peaceful laid-back little town of Emporium.
I am lucky enough to still have my Dad, who is living in Emporium today. I go back in time as I sit on my late Mother's front porch swing, on his screened in front porch, not too far from what used to be the railroad tracks.
She was me? I am she? I lived that little girl's life and I'm here to tell you that Emporium is the best little town in the world because of her people and the character building that begins in that wonderful mile wide valley in the hills of Pennsylvania.
The passion that I have for Emporium, Pennsylvania was the "first dot" in many that we have connected in order to form Hometown Mentors, Inc.
I'd like to tell you about the beginning of HMI. The story is interesting and something that could be done in any small town in Pennsylvania. Actually, it could be done in any small town in the US. This unique 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation, given it's exceptional board of directors, has done some truly great things for Emporium.
They (my family, my friends, the town folk) all said it couldn't be done. But, they also said to me many times in life, "I don't know how you do it. I wouldn't be able to get through all this."
We all have to WANT to do something. Do you have a passion for your hometown? Let me show you how easy it might be. The saying goes, "God doesn't send the equipped, He equips those He sends. Read on to learn the story of how HMI came to be a legitimate nonprofit.
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Butterfly Blessings,
The Real Cathy
