In Homage to Isakov...and Love

For the Gift of Second Chances

Blue Sulphur Springs Pavilion, West Virginia

Every February for the past six or so years, Shawn and I have made the long, meandering drive through Pennsylvania pastures, West Virginia hollers, and Kentucky dirt roads to a small writers’ retreat situated in a small town you’ve never heard of, until you go there and realize it’s the small town everyone knows…or at least wants to.

It’s called Stanford, Kentucky and the main street doesn’t stretch much further than a football field. Probably shorter. But it’s lovely in all the ways that small towns should be.

There’s the pharmacy that doubles as a soda fountain; if you walk through the front door, you’ll believe you died and woke up in Bedford Falls; and sure enough, there’s little George Bailey dipping ice cream behind the counter, talking about coconuts and harems. Beyond there, a handful of Mom & Pop shops make up the store fronts, peddling everything from wool socks to handmade pottery to goat milk soap (whose supply comes from the farm down the road.) There’s the barbershop with its old-timers warming the vinyl seats in front of the mirrors and The Bluebird Restaurant, where you’ll swear the southern grandma you wish you had is somewhere in the back, frying up a tangy batch of the best green tomatoes you ever tasted.

And in the midst of this storybook setting, Shawn and I get to meet with a small yet wizened cache of writers who we’ve come to see as family. We do all the clichéd bits that are necessary to bind human souls together: crying, laughing, eating, playing, and, best of all, storytelling. And we do it for the better part of three days. Then we scatter back to our homes across the country and wait for the next year.

Shawn and I have shown up here every year, rain or shine, money in our pockets or riding on fumes, our love for each other as deep, high, and sturdy as an oak…or stripped bare of its bark and left to the mercy of the elements.

Yesterday, as we made our journey to Kentucky once again, I was reminded of the years that this trip was not as idyllic as the Stanford Main Street.

And so I did what any writer who claims the name would do.

I wrote a poem.