Marcia Ann Sullivan

The Hills Summoned

Thursday, November 24, 1988, Marcia Mullins

I am enclosing something I wrote in 1987, shortly after my husband and I moved back to West Virginia. We were raised in West Virginia but we moved away shortly after we were married to attend college. Twelve years later we returned to stay.

 

Many times we returned we have been confronted by people from this area wanting to know why we came back. They tell us that “there is nothing here.” But, oh, how mistaken they are. West Virginia is full of rich heritage of our past and a rich promise of our future. We can claim that promise and help it to come true if we will face our problems with a determination to solve them, and not accept them as our due. We must work together. Only then will we cease to be part of the problem and see our future fulfilled.

 

The hills. The seemingly silent majestic hills. They called me back.

 

They did not beg nor whine as some may think West Virginia would tend to. They summoned. 

 

I had left as a young bride. That was all right. I had learned many things among my new horizons. But now I was being summoned. 

 

Homesickness had come and gone. It was not that. I had defeated that and grown to love my transplanted soil. 

 

As the situation turned and the path cleared for our return (for my mate came also from the beckoning hills) our children, born and bred where we had only been transplanted wondered: What was it that drew us back? Aside from family ties.

 

So, as we filled the mountain of boxes with the clutter of our lives to make this move, I told them of the hills they had only visited briefly. 

 

Quiet and stately, I told them, the hills shelter much great loveliness. They are enduring – offering to all those rugged enough to let their roots sink deep into the land, that same endurance. This was not a perfect place – pickets of poverty and ignorance are there, perhaps more difficult to improve because of the impulse some had to hide in the folds of the hills. 

 

But we will return. I said to the bright faces before me, to repay the debt of love their father and I owe those hills that us in our youth. And to give our children the chance we had – to sink their roots down deep and learn the enduring ways of West Virginia.