@mommachatter - I absolutely cried when I got your letter this morning, and I know that you wanted to make me happy, and really;  I am happy, but I cry easily, but this is over the top, that with all that is on your shoulders from most of the time, you would get out there and make a decision to buy my book. Just please warn your Mom and Dad, that there are a few R-rated episodes, but they were put in there, because no one could be born without a few R ratingse , and I wanted younger people to get the idea of what it is like to be ill informed of such matters// I needed for you to go out and to purchase that book — in whatever form you chose, and as I go along I am meeting the survival people — Who, like your family, comes out of another hidden realm where poverty in America was kept hidden from the front page news, so you become a part of my story.  Last week a beautiful person wrote me that the Ozarks  had areas of similar decimation of little towns and people who had such legacies there, so, though the Appalachians have the largest footprint and, “In your face presence,” and was so near and obvious to our dear folks in Washington, D. C., these once beautiful people of the soil, the oil, the coal have not been heard either.

Now the shame comes out, and for all of us who lives such lives, we have joined many Americans in knowing that what matters are the districts where the voting public is visible, and mid-century on in to the 70s rural areas valued going to their polling places, but the people of our society never had a lick of energy left, and far too few votes to be bothered with.  A friend in Los Angeles who handed me my first place award in The Hollywood Book Festival said that I need to get out there and do some public speaking, for he is very Professorial and he understood my book’s intention — To cry out that 3rd world America exist, that until we find each other and spread the news of America’s forgotten and hidden poor and their progeny will continue to fizzle.

Thank you from the depths of my heart, for I would have never guessed the oil field worker’s also were kept in their place, so to speak.  Dividing the poor in colonies was very engineering politics. Just think how eloquently we could have spoken of our mother’s kitchens had we stired that cornbread and milk up a little thicker, fried it with the drippings of the organic pig that got unlucky one year and cured out as bacon,but then gave it zeal with winter greens and heirloom slices of turnips from our dad’s stash of rutabagas all nestled in a bed of dandelion greens for that kiss of color; We could have had the food channel stars weeping over the influence of American no how with that touch and zest of the Italian immigrants influence on the Scot/Irish qusine which had failed to Polenta.  Mountain folk, like mine called it mush, but it stuck to one’s ribs more if you fried the cocoction, called it fried corn bread and the well simmered, “Greens and turnips with pot liquor soaked in to that fried corn bread, and most of us kids could not get enough of it.

Please, God, may this beautiful person feel the hug I am sending her for bothering to go to Amazon and download my book.  Bless her with the rising sun, for, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” is our story — Just in other places, but in one America.

Great Love and Blessings, Barb

Barbara Everett Heintz, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” Amazon and Kindle

         Gracious God,To Be Young Once More!  I have to asky you if you are a trainer, or do you enjoy working out?  When I was beginning with degenearive arthritis, we belonged to a nice gym in Cincinnati, a long while age.  Here in San Francisco, I do not want to go to the hospital  pools, for they have the 80s to 90 plus set, and we are all getting there at one point, but it is quite depressing to stuff myself in to that group — I do not want to be reminded every day of such reality down the pike.  Other trainers unless I go to PT hurt me too much, ao if you work out with arthritic folks, just be gentle,

Thank you so much that you will consider my book.  As I go along, I am getting letters from people who lived in similar hidden places from the Ozarks to the oil fields, and certainly from the life I wrote about in North Alabama, Georgia, and and the foothill mountains along the Cumberland Gap, and though I narrate the story as from my life, the same crimes against young women and children, the problems when the Dyaspora of south to north put men to work in the shame of minimum wage to try to send food home, and I spell out, disrobe my life, the things which almost destroyed me, I was hoping this would happen — a door opened to let the hidden people come out, speak up, and scream for the respect taken from them when the settled in homes, created cities, lived the most, “Green,” lives imaginable until mid- 20th century called them to be slaves to factories living like animals in Rust Belt cities, so they gave up the earth, and took their anger out on what they called us, “The mouths they had to feed.”

It is not all despair, for we would make our own humor and laugh at the pretentious jerks who felt their importance but left white folks out of their giving spirit to the world on pverty.  Yes, we laughed, we lived, and we loved no matter how this country hid us away.

Thanks so much for considering my book.

Blessings, Barb

Barbara Everett Heintz, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” Amazon Books or Kindle Ready – Awards in Hollywood and San Francisco