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Grateful for winter

As has been true for so many across the country, including those in the deep south, the winter of 2025 has been a memorable one in the West Virginia mountains. I have heard many stories of winters past that left indelible memories. Cafeteria trays transformed into sleds on the front campus hill, epic snowball fights, and trudging through feet of snow to reach class seem to be rites of passage for D&E students. The recent bout of wintry weather that began in very early January has been the most significant I have experienced in my nine winters in Elkins. Snow measured in feet rather ...

House flipping

The fight over whether to appoint a Republican or a Democrat to the 91st District House of Delegates seat is a fascinating one for me, a former legislative staffer who nerds out over these kinds of questions. I’ve had a story in the papers nearly every other day regarding the writ of mandamus lawsuit filed by the West Virginia Democratic Party, so I won’t go into the minute details. But here is a summary: Voters in the 91st District in Berkeley County vote for Republican Joseph de Soto in the May over Tammy Hess and former delegate Don Forsht. De Soto won the November general ...

Is Trump the second coming of Jackson?

The portrait of Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he entered for the first time as the 47th president. It’s a choice Democrats are poorly positioned to criticize, even though the seventh president owned slaves and ordered the Southeastern Indians west on the Trail of Tears. Inconveniently, Jackson was long a Democratic icon, nominated for his second term in 1832 by the first Democratic National Convention, and there is something to be said for the man who founded what is now the world’s oldest political ...

Invitation to worship

The tone was set by Franklin Graham’s invocation. Preachers are a fixture at presidential inaugurations, but until now they’ve confined their words to asking the Almighty to bless the new president and his family and to guide the nation to goodness and mercy. The prophets were popular choices. Not this time. Graham used the opportunity not to praise God but to worship Donald Trump. Regarding the inauguration, Graham exulted, “Look what the Lord has done!” It was a theme the most glassy-eyed Trump acolytes have sounded since the Pennsylvania assassination attempt — that God ...

Biden’s legacy

Joe Biden‘s presidency is not going out on a pleasant note. His popularity is below 30% in some polls, yet he insists he was a successful President. Some progressives still taut his successes in passing legislation on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. It has been an administration filled with bluster and brag; and at times, Biden himself has appeared delusional. Assuredly he passed legislation such as the Infrastructure Investment, the Jobs Act, and the Chips Act of 2022, but these were not sweeping in their impact on American society. FDR passed Social Security, ...

In bleak midwinter we need a cozy quilt

The title of a favorite Christmas carol has been a real inspiration to me during these last weeks of extreme cold. Bleak midwinters have been part of life in these West Virginia hills for thousands of years, and finding ways to keep warm has been a central focus for women in all cold climates. They had to cobble together whatever they could find to keep warm. Making quilts out of what they had was essential for survival in earlier times, but by the 1880s during the religious Great Awakening and the American Gilded Age creating crazy quilts became a socially acceptable art form. These ...