As part of Governor Manchin's "Come Home to West Virginia" effort, our state's Wonderful West Virginia Magazine will be publishing a special "West Virginia Reunion" issue. As a West Virginia author, I was asked to share my thoughts on West Virginia and "coming home" to our beautiful state. This is what I wrote:

1. During the years we lived in Michigan, coming home to West Virginia meant singing “Oh, those hills, beautiful hills, how I love those West Virginia hills . . ." with my husband and our two children when we caught our first sight of the West Virginia hills as we were driving back home to visit my family in Weirton.

2. My favorite West Virginia reunion memory has to be plural. It is all of my high school reunions (Madonna High School, Class of 1966). As I look around at all of those faces, now beginning to grow old, I am always reminded of Willa Cather’s words of how “We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

3. West Virginia’s best-kept secret is its fifty shades of springtime-green.

4. Even when I am away from West Virginia I feel its influence: The hills, the mountains -- it’s the land that always pulls me home. Of my books, my newest one, GOLDEN DELICIOUS: A CINDERELLA APPLE STORY, is an ideal “Homesick Remedy.” Why? Because it’s a fun, true story about the discovery of the Golden Delicious apple on Anderson Mullins’s Clay County farm.   Kathleen Kemly’s beautiful illustrations will make you want to sink your teeth into one of those “gorgeous, glowing, golden apples.” No wonder Golden Delicious is our state fruit! 

me at Canaan Valley