Dear Xanga Friends,

Right now I am ready to throw this lap top across the room and smash it to bits.  It just erased my entire letter to you which asked kindly for the mercy of all of you who have taken an interest in, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” and if those of you who mentioned wanting to read it;  Then I am asking you, pleading with you, to please put a review in my Amazon sales site under author’s name:  Barbara Everett Heintz – Amazon, Kindle Ready, and Create Space.  Obviously, I know that a lot of you are busy, and who has the time to read a story about a mid century Appalachian girl and her journey in to the darkest places she never knew existed until the dark places consumed her and left her with only fate and grace to restore her.  The history of the northern migration is excellent, if I do say so, and if you wonder where the people in your area who settled near the river banks came from and sound to this day as if they came out of a woods in Georgia;  the book is going to tell you that.  You know that our country has secret third worlds of people, but I do not believe you understand the vastness and the curious nature of Appalachian people where the food, the worship;  All are different..  If you did read my book, and I know we’ve sold some;  Would you please go to my spot on Amazon and give my brother and I a review of the good parts you read.  No one is going to love everything about it;  But it would certainly help me in Hollywood to get more reviews, and if this book makes history and actually becomes a movie;  Then I will bless you all for being a part of its getting to that point. Since I won the first honorable mention for biography/autobiography in San Francisco, I am hoping for better in Hollywood; so please take the time to review what you have read from me: Barbara Everett Heintz, Author, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” Amazon, Kindle Ready and Create Space, and easily ordered through independents anywhere.

God Bless – Better Stories Ahead
Barb Hz

Days tend to stand a little more still on the hill, and when I return, I always stand out on the public overlook, browse around me and endeavor to remember what it was like when I first came there as a bride almost, but within one year I had my Jacob, so I was going to meet the family; Frank was still not out of the Marine Band, and Vietnam was still not over, so Haight/Ashbury was still in its genuine Old Hippie phase, and everyone offered you a puff off something or asked you what you, “Did,” meaning drugs.  They were not asking about a college education or what we did to put food on the table, and was I ever shocked when I saw where all of these people lived, for when I walked through Murfreesboro, the well off part as a student, the houses were mainly Queen Anne or Victorian with the obligatory front porch and more space than people could live in, and my heart spoke to me in those homes, for I was a Southern girl, and these were my dreams of where I might live someday when nights allowed me to dream and to not have night terrors of places in my past.  How could any child be so lucky as ever to have grown up in that shady old town where the trees were like memorials of every soul that ever grew up in them;  Each leaf was a page, a limb was a story, and a whole tree – That was someone’s life, so I could become a reader of trees, hear them whisper as they spoke, but as much as I loved Murfreesboro, the page that I made would only become one strong limb. 

In San Francisco in the early 70s, let us say the city had not become green yet, and I was thin to the bone, and the breezes headed to the Bay came over the new family home so swiftly that I though each gale was going to pick me up, and I would be singing Mary Poppins, and my baby, Jacob, and I might just fly over London Bridge before we stopped.  I do remember that up on seeing my mother in law’s green linoleum, past an early sink, a Servel refrigerator which would not die, won at Tuggy’s hardware, and realizing the kitchen always smelled like a gas stove and intrinsic mold;  I had a feeling creep up on me almost like the ache when I left Murfreesboro, that I had left all that I knew and loved behind for a place which felt a lot like Alabama, for even my folks had hard wood floors by then and a new kitchen.  It was 1970, an episode of, “I Love Lucy,” and my husband’s dream would be that this place would be our home some day. ” Oh God Help Me In Glory,” and finding out it had four floors did not help much, because I did not know that we would spend most of our lives we were not out in the breakfast nook off the kitchen.

I am not certain that my husband could have prepared me, for in his book of life and by measure of most of California, San Francisco, especially, we had the big house, the one on the corner, and I had no idea that having a garage was like owning part of a sanctuary, a real garage, and to this day, I do not know how my mother in law got in and out of that sucker, though my husband still can.  I think I pictured warm days, palm trees, a perfectly white and warm beach nearby, and maybe swimming pools in back yards, for it was at that time that the cost of housing in San Francisco would start going up, and it has not stopped since…

I woke up everyday and endeavored to see something warm and beautiful, and waking up was no problem for Frank’s mother never got out of bed without putting her Floorsheims on and starting breakfast, a ritual she loved with the older grandchildren whoose arteries began to clog in the earliest years with pancakes made from bisquick, but as with her own children;  A child’s pancake was usually a mouse with two ears or a bunny; whatever she could design with circles in a pan, so I did not know of people who gloated over their grandchildren so.  I would learn to be content with the lemon tree and the bougainvillaea so brilliantly purple to the point of irredescence, a small side garden, and a washroom separated on the second level all to itself.  I used cloth diapers with the first two babies to keep them free of rash, for paper had not come very far then, so for four weeks I would wash diapers or use a diaper service, so I would make friends with the spider webs which crawled from line to line in that dark old room, for the summer fog can in like mist over Twin Peaks and then over to us.

I can only say that I was very impressed at her wonderful neighbors, and I would meet her neighbor, a woman whose name was Marilyn, and for two years, Marilyn would make me cheer up, and on about the third year of going there, I would come in knowing that Marilyn was gone, murdered in her front door by her husband who somehow got off with a year in the pen and a slap on the wrist, for his mental illness and her having found another lover was enough back then to justify a woman’s life’s end.  Marilyn would have liked my book, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” and maybe she is one of the angels for whom I had to write it.  I became aware then that violence was as much a part of idealistic San Francisco as the world which I left behind.  The boys who would purchase her house knows that Marilyn comes in a metaphysical way to this day, and she lights candles, opens things, and sometimes she even gives herself a flower.

Now I have wooden floors where once the green linoleum stood, and I have a washer and dryer inside the house there, but we will never have an orange tree, a tall palm, and selling off the side lot; A glass house has now stolen our thunder, but my Frank needed this house, and he still thinks it is paradise.  San Francisco has many wealthy people who would like our house, and they would do as I wish, take a sledge  hammer and knock out walls, put in skylights, and maybe a roof garden.

Who am I kidding though.  Even though it is a greener city, I still remember the dear old town of Murfreesboro, and my guess is that my limb still throws a summer’s breeze over lovers even though my book has been written in another place or another time.  I can hear the summer sounds there tonight as if I were 17, and I could retrace my path.  Nothing is lost on the summer’s air, nor are people,  I will send them butterflys for their gardens and rosebuds for the steps that lead to the grand old homes which are left knowing that I would go to a place called, San Francisco, and the joke would fall on me…

Barbara Everett Heintz, “Pinkhoneysuckle Author,” Amazon, Kindle Ready, and Create Space
The Pinkhoneysuckle Blogger

Hello to Almut in Germany, to Elaina in Slovenia, and to Anne in Southampton,  We might say in English, “For Goodness Sake,” as an expletive, for I did not know until this day that my book site:  Amazon – Kindle Ready, Create Space, and Independents throughout America who can access my site.  I did not know until this day, almost nine months after the fact that my book, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” under my writer’s name, Barbara Everett Heintz, had not included Europe as one of my channels for sales, and how this happened is a deep mystery, for I bring home to you what happened, especially, to those of us with roots in The United Kingdom, what happened to many Americans after they arrived here in the 17th and 18th — continuining in to the 20th century.  Many who would hunger for the homelands which they had left behind would find themselves 300 years later still fighting class systems and social imperialism which we believed we had left behind with our forefathers however they came across the great waters.  I am simply many stories in, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” I believe that I introduce you to an America where most of you will never go unless you hike the great Appalachian Trail which is official national park land and whose trail goes from the sudden buds of the mountains at their southern most tip in Jackson County, Alabama where I was born, and continues with twist and turns all the way to coastal Maine.  This over 2000 mile trail has been know to trekkies for many years, but even though I was born almost sitting on the trail itself, no one ever told me that it existed, and I would not understand its significance until I was well in to middle age.

We were and many still are the hidden Americans, those who used to be fully independent from most of what was outside of them as agrarian farmers, sharecropppers, and the poorest of the poor, both white and black.  As the mountains change in scope, their usage changes, but all through West Virginia into the last quarter of the last century mountaintops were literally blown off to feed the need for more coal based problem, but mainly for the coal which would power plants from East to West.  Rather than the Scot Irish and English of the South who mixed with the blood of native Americans and the American Indian, the further north and east one goes, the more you are apt to meet the coal minors.  Our factories, while they existed, were usually non union, so they were low pay, and people just took it on faith that the dollar they got was the only dollar they were worth, whether that was to last two hours or two days.  Segregating poverty is one way of always making certain that you have a ready and willing working class, and we became the hidden people.

A 1980′s movie called, “Deliverance,” made us appear to the world as if we were the blood thirsty aliens willing to kill anyone who came on my turf, but to the contrary, we were people waiting to find a way to become and to move ourselves out to the world.  Every effort was made to keep us dependent though, so a farmer might supplement his income with moonshine in the old days, and then have come the most crucial, area destructive playing of the card — watching people become welfare dependent and strung out on drugs on the cheapest, nastiest, God forbidden drugs which every other household would have struggles with. It meant again, that if we were a thankless bunch of hillbillies, we got what we deserved, and it began with staying poor enough to serve the same old masters who had evolved from The Civil War.

No one has ever written a truthful history, a fiction of a woman to represent most women and children drowned in Appalachian Poverty such as does my book, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” but I had sworn even if it was the last thing I did, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” would get written to shout out at America;  “Look what you did to your own people!”  It seems as if when people can retire behind their lovely gardens, homes, and fences in America, then poor people per usual are left outside even more than the family dog.  We are a country where people dress their dogs for the holidays if they can afford it while children scrounge for a bite to eat on many of those days.  Are we a third world?

We support a third world mentality that people get what they deserve.  We use words like white trash, while the N word has been retired, because there were powers in numbers.  We are hillbillies, Bible thumpers, and people who to one extreme cannot dance or touch a drop of alcohol to a group of coal minors who are banded together as a brotherhood, but still there are areas where people never can get out of debt when we are owned by the little stores which are the nearest to neighborhoods.  A major store which I cannot mention has killed the downtowns and little stores where there might be room for some help and at least human contact with other classes,  that, cheap food which destrouyed the urge to can, and clothing which came off the racks cheaper than they could be made even have taken away the basic skills and craft which our people prided themselcves in making.

So, I open my heart to you and tell you that I went so far as to undress my soul and body to get this book written as everything from a fiction and love story all the way to being a historic record of America through the end of the 20th century.  The title sounds sweet, but the message is harsh and direct, that things have not necessarily improved with population growth, that the original families are more apt now to be hired help, or to live in supported housing, or to be receiving welfare in someway.  They saw their mothers and fathers live and die as the working class, and in work there is no shame, but it is absolutely a sin that people are just ignored as not worth the time of anyone other than a good Samaritan now and again.  Many areas that look so beautiful from afar are dumping grounds for toxic waste, for people are not told that such dumping is going to kill their kids and grandchildren through the years, and now the worst of drugs, the ones which can be cooked like the once welcome moonshine person makes something called meth which they swear will ease all that ails you, and it does, for it kills the person and ages them years beyond a hard working body, but the pain, the angish, the loss seems to ease that pain of something lost, sheer individualism and pride, so another generation is going away who remember the old way and the crafts which are apt to be seen at city craft shows than anywhere in the mountains.

I invite my European supporters to pleae come to the table of this, “Appalachian Tale,” and you will see that there is much more to a people than you ever imagined, and they, like you sometimes feel very emotionally torn.  It may be a surprise to most Europeans, but one feels an emptiness for a place called home.  Homes were made in this country, but many, like me who have a maternal DNA of 99% European, and mainly from the North of England, we have an emptiness we do not understand, and what it is includes our nature to long for our roots, or at least to be welcomed where we are transplanted.

“Pinkhoneysuckle,” on Amazon is going to give you an award winning book from The San Francisco Book Festival, competing again in Hollywood, and if you would look at Amazon, Kindle, or Create Space, then you will find me; Barbara Everett Heintz with a prologue by my brother, Robert Van Everett.  He begins and cleverly takes you to what it was like to be a young man at 13 and to show you the northern migration of people which took Appalachians to worse lives in the cities.  We did what we had to do to survive, and our story is just one of many, so please open your hearts to understanding there is a third world America, and this time we just need to climb mountains, and build bridges, provide fresh water, and trash bins for those who foul our beautiful world.  “Pinkhoneysuckle,” tells an American story.

Receive it and know that I am simply one of your own who moved away several centuries ago, and in the survival of the fittest, we crossed the waters but still feel a longing for where we first began.

Blessings To My European World Family,
Barbara Everett Heintz, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” book on Amazon, and Pinkhoneysuckle, My blog on Xanga.

I want to do a nice thing for a city on seven hills with a river that runs through it, and glorious parks are all over the city, that for the first time ever; The United States is hosting The World Choir Games, and the clips which I have seen from practices, welcomes, and from the many countries like the African Nations, and Nations From China, The United Kingdom, The Orient, and every where across the globe where people sing and dance are gathering in this wonderful river town which we call home part of the time, and I am so excited about it for the citizens of Cincinnati, and the residents of Northern Kentucky where all of these folks shall gather in July — Exact dates elude me at this late hour, but at one time and in one voice, at least 15,000 people are gathering in our cities center, and in one voice, all will make a joyful sound which you will be hearing and seeing on your radios, televisions, or whatever form of media — Just people singing.

I believe that Mayor Mark Mallory and his public servants as well as the gracious people in this part of the world are going to go out of their way to show the world our town which many think is the heart of conservatism, but it is like many places, for you can be as conservative or out there as you choose to be within the boundaries of good taste, and this city treats its guest as if they were golden.  There is the fabulous Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra which has outlived city orchestras  where the population was larger, but the music lovers just were not there, and they are always going to reorganize, and some have a chance, but if people want new music, Then the CSO is going to pull them in with the Pops – Same great orchestra, just getting the job done so that beautiful and classical music will always have a home here.  The 300 plus members of The May Festival Chorus are singers from all over the city who get to perform with the orchestra in May, of course, and through the year when you need voices to bring the house down.

I know that every member of every arts organization in the city is putting out the red carpet, and when I see the costumes, the dancers who dance and sing in a manner so foreign to us here, then I think we have to be a might lucky group to have the joy of knowing the world’s great voices are coming to this place, our place, this little gem of a town which we grew to love long ago.

But Then, Idiots we are, we will not be here for the festivities, because my husband needs to play at The Bohemian Grove in San Francisco, and I want to prepare there for The Hollywood 2012 Book Show, so why enter another one you may ask;   You got a first honorable mention in the last, and that is just the point;  I did get an award, but I really needed to enter more appropriate categories to be judged on in Hollywood, and placing in San Francisco gives me a shot in the dark at a greater prize.  I am not bragging folks, but I worked, lived, breathed, and made myself ill getting, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” out there, and it is still not perfect, but if you are going to write a book, you are going to have to find someway to market it, and I find this group able to bring talent in, and I am even beginning to think second book, partially because of them.  The yearly book festivals are worth a shot, and you will know them, because on the internet, they will be, The Great Book Festival for 2012 — 2013, and I happen to know that one is coming up in the southeast next springtime, but you are given a chance to know what genuine reviewers had to say about you and how you captured them in a story.

I know that it is hard to get the money to go to these events, but it is worth giving something up for and counting your dollars — Maybe even asking a church group to sponsor you, for there are categories for everything under the sun, and it moves around, so one will be close to you, if not now, then soon.  It is my understanding that entries for Hollywood are closed, but you can double check that.  The prize money is small, but the feeling of accomplishment is resoundingly above all that you could imagine.

Leaving my travelogues I am laying out for all of my Xanga friends, Then once again, I thank you, and I bless you, for, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” is having some sales, and it is through the kindness of you to whom I have written, some old friends and loved ones who are now getting the news that I finally got up the nerve to put this life on paper, for one has to be prepared for naysayers, criticism, and those who just despise you, because they find displeasure with what you have to say.  I have family and friends who did not want me to use any bad words or to bring forth a lot of the truth, because they wanted no one to know about things which hid in closets through the years, not to clean out the closets, but to simply build more for women and children of fear, and the evil souls who would harm them to have bigger closets to hold the sorrow of ages.

The Appalachians, and the humble people who struggle on deserve to have the doors opened for them, and for someone to feed them the love of bread and jam, to wipe their tears, to help build their egos to that place where they can be the self sufficient and independent souls where large places, like mountains ask much of you.  One never knows what is in the darkness;  So do not fear sweet friends; do not fear, for I have told them my story, your story, and we’ve lived together in hope, and you all know as well as I that if you want to get some place; Then sometimes you just have to get back up and go walking;  That’s what Mama and Daddy left with me, so God,  I am talking to you, and please hear, that we need homeplaces back, and would you throw in a Sunday dinner or two.  Thank you God.  With prayers for the latest of the West Virginia snake handlers who died from a timber rattler bite in worship, then for him, and for his family, I want to pray too.  Though his Daddy died from a similar event; Never think this was a stupid man among aimless and stupid people.  It is people who read Mark, Chapter ll, I believe, and took what I believe was a symbolic way of the apostle Mark to tell his people that if they were true believers, nothing can hurt you, not poison drink, not the bite of the serpent, but Mark was not prepared to know that some Christians would take this as a metaphor to become snake handlers to show the devil they could even dance with the serpent.

I want to end in thought and prayer for these people, for I know there are some out on Sand Mountain, and they know how people paint them as absolute trash, and I cannot worship with them, and I would like for serpent handling to end, because I think Mark was just speaking again, sort of out of a fable, but he wanted the new Christians to feel that they were protected from all things if they put on Christ in the sense of becoming members of what then was the first church.  Some will always carry on the old ways, but I have such a phobia about snakes that, just loke my brothers did when they were young and went to a snake handler’s service, this woman is going to get out of there to get some air mighty fast.  With my luck, there would be a three foot copper sitting right there looking at me just waiting until I put one foot down, and what that snake would not know is that I would faint backwards on the spot, so he would just have to lie there until someone braver than me smashed him with a song book.  God bless those who die for their beliefs which honor the Christ for which many of us hope shall one day appear as peace upon the earth…

Blessings My Friends,
Barbara Everettt Heintz, Pinkhoneysuckle Blogger, and “Pinkhoneysuckle,” The book on Create Space, Amazon,
And Kindle Ready — I thank you again for your purchase and for reading my Amazon Book site.

Dear Friends,

Some of you heard my plaintive plea to go to the, “Amazon,” “Pinkhoneysuckle” book site, and you read the free part which I almost begged you to this May, for I have not a promoter, and that is no one’s fault, and I have had to share with you that writing the book is the easy part, but if you want to market it and to have people learn something from all that you wrote, love what they read, and hope that the message bears the good fruit of bringing change about in an area which needs some change; then it is the marketing, finding readers outside your close circle who tolerates and indulges you by purchasing the book early on.//Thank those of you who brought the May miracle of some sales, and to all of you who bought in the month of June;  Bless your spirits as well, for this is hard, coming and talking about something which cost something.  I set out a goal that, if this picks up enough to cover even part of my expense, then one dollar of every book sold is going to, “Tennessee Cares,” and I am not using this as a ploy to sale anything.

This is the simple truth, that my little brother six years younger than me is among the most disfigured people facially that I have ever known, and Jame’s appearance as we would lead him around the streets of Winchester back in the old days was a cause for every idiot to stop and point, but he was a baby brother, and I did not get it that human beings are beyond the ability to love the disabled no matter how mortifying they can appear.  To me, he was just a wild as hell little brother, and even as he grew up, thank God he could not understand what fools were saying as they pointed.

I used what I will define now as, The frozen smile, for I was never quite sure if they were making fun of James or of me, because I had a lazy eye that would follow only the center of my nose, so I would grab James by the hand so that Mama could have a minute alone in the five and dime where James would not be screeching like a wild clan of new born hyenas, or he would not reach out for the glass object, pitch it across the floor and feel such exertion that he then had to start throwing them by armloads with me, or Mama, or Daddy, someone taking him out and having to control our own emotions not to wring his neck, for we were trying to teach him to act better with minimal success.  We had learned by the switch, and to Mom and Dad he was going to learn the same way, so he got the hell beat out of him regularly without any social work intervention.  I would pity a social worker who would come to our advise my mother and father about their poor little sick boy, for such a person would have left with the glass of sweet tea given to her with a smile, having it run down her face and straight through  to her under drawers, and all of the kids including me would have hidden out back until it was over.

In the town there were so many who had IQs equal to a half empty sugar bowl, so they would be doing their pointing, laughing like jack rabbits; My frozen smile was fixed, and James was baying at some unseen moon at the time.  As my brother aged it has occurred to me that his face has somewhat the appearance and shape of when humans were called Neanderthal, but when you live every day with someone, then it is just a face, baby brother needing a hug, and if he screeched like a monkey or was running to chase a timber rattler; Then he was just still my baby brother.  About ten minutes out in town with him was about all I could take though, because he would start pulling away, and morons with their mufflers were apt to spin out on the square where we actually had three stop lights if I remember correctly, but James would have been killed on the street had I lost my grasp, and by then the frozen smile was thinking up some insults  that I could lay at the pointer’s feet.  I might have quizzed them on their marriage to the first cousins, but I did not know exactly what that meant.  It had to have a curse word to get their attention, so I would try to say, “Damned Fool, why don’t you just take that finger in shove it up your nose so you can scratch your brain, or is that an ass on top of your head.

I could not help myself, especially then, and when I got baptized then they would wash the cursing out of me, but I would have had being the town square freak show for about as long as I would take, and I would see Mama’s disappointment when I walked back in as she endeavored to find the match to a three dollar pair of shoes which she thought might do.  With a cross look coming from her, then out we would go again, and we would start the routine all over with James energized by the very site of those cute little, “Made in Japan” poodles on a chain that he was itching to get at, and I could not bear for Mama to cry and to apologize for breakage just because I could not face the inevitable;  “Here comes the side show,” but I did notice they were reaching for something in their noses as I would walk by.

James is about 57 now, and he still can cause quite a ruckus, but God sent a family of angels who have now kept him and Sam his roommate since Tennessee had the goodness by the will of the people to close the old Clover Bottom where the helpless and the mentally broken were cared for, and we were glad that he got that when he did, because when he decided that your windows needed the lamps thrown through them or the old cat needed surgery or a look inside, not to mention that James though no more of picking up any old snake that you’d have to chase him for, though he never got bitten, every child had to leave home, but James needed around the clock care, so he wound up at this bottom arm pit of humanity where mentally challenged and those you were unable to take into your home had to go.  He lived in this situation for about 15 years, but even then the good people of my home state were putting together a program where well people with the space, child rearing skills, the patience, and the ability to deal with Jame’s constant Grandmal seizures that begin on go over several days before they cycle out; So the best families had a little EMT skill.

That was when James wound up in the best home that a boy who would never really be a man in thought could live, so after growing up with all of us James got to live in a new house in Murfreesboro with his own room, all of his own things not being stollen every week, and Jeff and Dawn who loves these boys as if they were their own.  My sisters who live in Atlanta have had to go to battle more times than you could imagine to keep the situation just as it is now, for James has another family whose children hug him, hold him, kiss him on his cheek, because it hates it just to get him to do his laughing, and to say, :”Stop it,” loving every minute of this attention and hoping for more.  I have not approached, “Tennessee Cares,” with my idea, because I have not broken in to the point where I feel my sales are outweighing the buying of the books which I provide for people,  I need the word to get out more strongly, and I need to write Tennessee Cares, for the content of my book may be too harsh for some of them to go forward with and to take it on to endeavor to make sales.

This is a point which is hard to deal with in the Bible Belt families, for sometimes, even for truth sake, then one is expected to use more Christic language, but I think this could work for all of us even though I share the period of time and things which seem out of Christian teaching, but I also share the need, no matter who we are or where we are from to give that which we can.  One dollar may not seem like a lot, but if I begin to market and to market well, then a thousand dollars is something, and it encourages other Appalachian writers to do the same.  I will stress that if there are degrees of holy behavior, then these people are God in action and in care.  All of the people who worked to get Tennesse Cares on the books, many families involved were those who had experience Clover Bottom which felt like a prison even from the scent of urine and waste, and I am certain there were big hearts that worked there, but Mama could not keep new clothes for my brother, and we could hardly send presents, for they disappeared even though my brother had a locker, and Mama was afraid to cast blame, for she knew that it would just make our brother’s life more difficult.

People often times left a loved one there like puppies left beside the road.  They could get as far as bringing the family member to the door, drop them off, drive away, and no one would have visited in years.  Again, my sisters in Atlanta has seen that James never goes more than a couple of months between visits, and I can never repay them enoguh as I go between  Ciincinnati and San Francisco to live now.  My husband is prepared each time I leave brother for me to cry half way back to Cincinnati, and I should be able to control it, but the tears just flow, and I cannot stop them no more than I can will the night of life not to fall.

Just pray that each state will look at Tnnessee and find the families who wish to take on the extra child.  It should be a model program for the nation, and, “Yes,” there are families with big hearts who want to save all of the people who are in the older facilites, but sometimes your heart is bigger than the energy which it takes to care for the disabled, and they are not failed people, for trying and making a fit are two different things.  Dawn and Jeff Ashby in Murfreesboro, Tennessee are Jame’s angels, and every year when they take James to the beach he gets to see tiny fish bubble up with the warm Atlantic waters, and he tells Jeff all of the old stories, and I wonder if he remembers us, and in his man to man talks, could he have told Jeff in words which could not be understood, that his sister had people searching for their brains while sticking thier fingers up their noses, and if he did, he would give Jeff a little poke in the ribs and expect him to giggle for a while.

So I continue with love and grace and ask you to please consider buying, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” By Barbara Everett Heintz – Kindle Ready, Available at Create Space, The County Library in Winchester, Tennessee, and apt to be in several independent book shops in San Francisco where the younger writers stand and lean against the stacks and listen to me sweat, because I hate selling and marketing.  Just know that now I’ve placed in San Francisco, so I am going to Hollywood with an attitude that I might can even win a category this time..

Summer time is almost here, and tonight the moon was so bright that the long day simply tarried until these early morning hours have come once moore.
Thank you; Lord I Thank You, and Always, I will remember all who helped me to get this book off the ground.

In Love and Grace and From James,
We Thank you Everyone

Hello My Fellow Novelist, Writers Who Write For The Love Of It, And The Lovers and Dreamers Like Me Who Believe We Have Lost Something As Book Stores Close, and Some Big Publishing Houses Are Feeling The Big; “E,” Holding a Sign, Standing With Horns, A Forked Tail, And the breath of necrotic material which spews as a syrupy voice announces, “Your done;  Get up and shut the doors, for the E books are here, and your tired old way of producing books has gone with the wind;”  Then the little rascal cast a fork in your side to watch the blood drain like a sacrifice should right there at, “The Publishing House’s brass signs, with the hallways which looked more like banks, and if you were judge well enough to get in the door, then the demon sits down to eat,  laughing at another American tradition which is going away, the courting and mating of you and just the right  book publisher is part of the new another chapter being erased, because, “Mom,” the kids might say follow the computer road, and see the people who got away just in time not to feel murdered by the book novelist.

The little demon is laughing hysterically as you scan over the avenues to market something which passes for the need you had to write stories, and when it gets outside;  It rolls in the grace and eats dandelions as treats knowing that a lot of us are still waiting for the welcome guest who comes in and notes that we were happier before when someone else would take our wonderful books who would market  that which you have loved and built with the stroke of a pen in your midnights and under the summer trees, you walk and talk while others plan to listen to a book CD to get by at the next book club meeting, for we do not want to discuss it as if we were the idiot sucking raw corn while awaiting supper time.

I want the comfort of my teachers who said that I should write for the universe, so I will cloak my disenchantment with fine gifts, and give thanks and praise that my muse still sends me hope.  The letters keep coming from Europe and the Americas pretty much daily, so I slam the door on the little pest having the belly laugh outside, pitch the hostess gift he brought to me which was filled with poison berries and ask him to leave, for I have work to do, and maybe one night you might get to me and publishers who still be compelled by stories when the noon news progresses, and how delight full that some European purchased my book today plus a trusted friend, so I will go on working to see the veil of hope raised for we old timers who watch the time clock as if it is time for the trumpet to sound and for man to go before, and then I tell myself that no time was lost today for love as a priceless entity, and no great writer was ever without love, for we are the sons and daughters of Eve who left the garden without a hint of clothing, but she would learn to sew, and we would never know nakedness again.
Bless you through this June, gather rose petals just to keep our secret that we are among the thousands who checked in on me:  Barbara Everett Heintz, “Pinkhoneysuckle,,” my book which has folks looking at Xanga, for comments, Amazon and Kindle, Create Space and Independents for purchase, and a place to lock up the demon who wants to cancel the story which I built from other’s dark deeds, and from a place in time where most of you have never experienced.

Good Night, and Sweet Dreams; Many Thanks to My Readers;  Check out my stars on Amazon, and pray that I can rise up to greet them.  Love, Barb Hz

I owant to first, “Remember the boys and girls of the United States,” For whom this Memorial Day sets a time of deepest Remembrance.  I pray for each of us who have lost loved ones, no matter the years, for that love does not disappear, and we walk in the faith that on our journeys — We live in hope of seeing them again.  I learned a long time ago that a, “Heaven,” is something that is shared in three of the largest groups of faith, no matter whom was chosen as the prophet and guide who would lead us there, and I, along with you, am counting on a great reunion where there is no sorrow and where there is no pain.  Oh Lord though; Let us remember those who have died through The Armed Services, for they never got to know a world which was filled with peace.  I ask myself so often;  Why all of this war, from century to century, and could we not have hoped that man from Creation of the Universe would not have evolved into a better soul than to condone any war.  Oh;  Bless you who lost your children in wars abroad and on the unpeaceful cities and towns where evil is the loaded gun which has a main purpose among too many who use it — To Kill, To Destroy.

I want to remember the loving souls who have mercifully made my book, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” a place to come and read on Amazon and God Bless you all who have bought or rented it.  I have just begun my journey with that book, and it is a memory of another lost group of Americans who could use unarmed forces to rebuild with them and to bring them back to lives based on the belief that we can live well on all the gifts around us, that all else is just things which no one needs.  I remember the Americans who made the clothes, who canned the food, who made the tools, the mixing bowls, and the big iron kettles and skillets which cooked the meals of home.  Oh Lord, I remember that once we cared about what we made and when we did not endeavor to, “Police The World.”  I pray this day that Syria and all places of such unrest, through their own humanity, can stop the killing and live in the peace which appeared to be theirs throughout most of my life.

I want to remember the lost mothers and fathers to the war on drugs — This very day, and let my memory include the mother of my own beloved Isabella, a most special granddaughter who will never know her mother; And Jaynee, the mother of Shellie who died in a similar and useless manner.  Please may we just cut the non-sense and begin to wage war on the disease of addiction and not those who struggle with it.  Remember the kids who die on street corners every day, and those who are considered to be snitches who become the hunted.  It is beyond the scope of my nature to understand how people must become hunted, but the guns are out there.  They are government sanctioned, and;  “The Right To Bear Arms,” is not something which I feel should be read in the manner it is with so few restrictions, but I am just human, and I believe that we are human beings and not untamed animals.  I am proven wrong every day in every city in this country.

But in these hours of memory;  Let me not dwell so deeply in to the sadness, for to remember begins and ends with love.  We endeavor with all that is in us to forget the pain of feeling the absence of love; So let there be some joy in this recall, for the dead would not wish for us to waste one minute of our lives grieving  their loss.  I have been fascinated for years with children’s books, and most beloved to me are those who speak about, “A Peaceful Kingdom,” where all the wild animals can lie down with their fragile neighbors and just all take a nap or share a boxed lunch; So I wish for you and I to be that child who celebrates a memorial, and then when November and The Day of The Dead rolls around, then us let our proverbial altars be lain for the welcome of the lost, for they are with us.   I learned that from the dying and from my own brush with death, but tell the little children about a peaceful kingdom where they are loved and protected, and where, “Fear Not,” goes far beyond the Annunciation that Good News is out there for us.

Bless you who are too broken for this request, for grief interrupted can be grief that was needed for healing.  I will be remembering you, those whose hearts are so heavy no celebration can dwell in them yet.  I just ask you to trust me that the time will dull the pain, and you will be able to laugh again at the silly things, the funny kids, how mud  could become cakes with a dandelion frosting;  Yes, I remember you, and all who know love and pray for peace hold you tightly within our hearts.  Reach out your arms for the love which you need this day.

I love the New Testament, for it began the call for peace, and for over 2000 years man has not been able to come up with the Peace a humble Jewish teacher and prophet by the name of Jesus sought throughout his earthly life, so I love way he sent those out to preach to be peaceful even until their end.  They would be hunted animals too.  I love the Psalms and Proverbs, the playing of taps, the reading of names from village to village across this land for those who have been sacrificed in wars abroad or the war which is of constant concern to people in neighborhoods where peace means being locked up in your house and knowing that just down the street, bullets killed a mother or a small child, because those with guns are not trained marks men for the most part.

For those who destroy children whatsoever, I can only lend prayers, for their forgiveness is going to have to come from something greater than we human beings, for even if we thing we are, “Civilized,” we only have the ability to absorb that such things ever even occur, and we are just not that strong that we can forgive that which we cannot even conceive of as being possible outside of the worst accident.  We ache in remembering the children who could not flee from all evil at its worst.  In memorials we shall know that somethings are beyond compassion, so we must leave it there and let the laws of the land and then the laws of whomever you see as Divine to gather that branch.  It is no time to feel guilt that we are super human.

Memory – Memorial – Mercy – Miracle; What beautiful words, what sacred pacts, and how gracious each word is in its intention.  It is a day of responsibility to face these blessings which is not a Holy Day, but a summer’s day which begins a season we hold so very dear when on this side of time, the cold is gone for a while, and even our breath whispers the sound to recall and to rejoice.  The trumpets will play Taps, and flags will fly, and food will be more abundant than usual for humans and the creatures who roam this valley called earth with us, so; “Good morning my friends, and please spread that sentiment across the miles.  Happiness and lonliness have always been selected and beautiful companions, and Memorial Day, Decoration Day, we called it in the south are the hours we celebrate grief and loss with the happiness that loved ones come among us – Grief and Loss, but love to sooth us from every corner. 

God Bless, and I thank the ones who went to my, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” book site on this day past.  I share many memorials in that book as it is sent forth through many people’s kind words, their deeds, and their willingness to be gracious un to me, its author.  When I saw a number pop up on  my Create Space and Amazon site, then I knew that someone had remembered me, and it has been that way all the way though the sharing of my many markers of life’s recalls.  I end thus with a thank you in words more than I can express.  You fill my heart with the joy of knowing that you will meet many of my lost, and in return; You may meet my angels as well, for as we bear all things when we must, and you, through the reading of my writing make me stronger, and I will rest tonight feeling abiding love that you have cared enough to share what I kept hidden for so very long.

You are sacred, just like the memories we forgotten humans can only now own, for to walk out of the wild woods, then we are home once more.

You Are Sweet Companions, Barbara Everett Heintz – Author of, “Pinkhoneysuckle.” Amazon/Kindle Ready

I dedicate this days writing to Josef Schmiel, Sr, to Jack Cedarloff, To Jaynee and Toby, Dr. Albert Muhlman, To Mr. Thomas Jefferson Luttrell, To Marcie Zielazienski’s Men of the 101st, To Vince’s Father, Jim Spieg, and a list longer than my memory can hold, But expecially to The Children of Armed Forces, USA, Those who have been taken and those who abide.  All Blessings, Glory, and Honor.

My Dear Old Friends,

I have been wondering about you all for a long time, for my guess is that you are still a lot like me, a growing older child who never could openly deal with our nation’s treatment of us during mid to late 20th century, so I did something about it, so you could find me and thus I could find you as well.  You see, as did I that about 95% of this country had no earthly idea who we were, what we were existing on, or what happened to us in the long term of things, and I have had sadness;  Oh so much sadness since I put it all on paper, for you see;  Many in our family wanted to keep all of the secrets, for if people know the road we came out on;  Then they will see all of the flaws in our journey, and they cannot see the innocent children that we are, and in so many ways;  All that was still is, only it is more difficult now, for younger people think they make connections when they become Drug Lords, or when they dare a parent to take a hand to them, but even worse, because now we have a couple of generations of parents who do not care about a bunch of what some of my friends liked to call, “Dirt Poor People,” and I get it;  I really get it.

If you call someone, “Dirt Poor,” without knowing their circumstances;  then you are presuming that they were, as the word would imply, “Dirty,” that all people of that place on earth shared the same dirt, and that you become a mere particle which is teeming with the ages of all the dirty people gone before you, and it is a demeaning statement;  So please do not use it.  The kids picking cotton by hand were many families and many different lives, and our bond was living close to the earth, producing no trash, because there was no waste, and feeding ourselves and relatives in local towns until our gardens, “Played out,” a term my folks would use when the air would get crisp in the morning, and the vegetables and fruits were giving their last gifts of the season, the time of harvest which faded with only the cotton fields to get picked clean before Thanksgiving, a Holiday when people had turkey, and some people thing that Jesus called for the first Thanksgiving and rarely give the Colonials a lick of credit, but in 1962 to 1964, I would get sent out on maid duty to help our family make ends meet and so I would not be a burden in the house myself, because we saw them coming, the big cotton harvesters which tore up the fields, took our labor, and really left things pretty much a mess.

I am certain many among you cannot open your hearts to telling the stories which led you to walk the path of your bare feet either, but you had some walking to do;  sometimes some running, and if you could not find angels such as ones which would fall within my path again and again, then I am even beyond understanding your suffering.  I am looking for you, the last of the southern cotton pickers like me, and I think we need to let America know who we are, the boys and girls who milked cows before we went to school, gathered eggs, took care of the younger kids, and who hoped our house might be peaceful and we would not have to fear that day.  In our folks eyes, regular whippings kept us in our place and reminded us that bigger trouble like some kids got in to, like being with boys and girls our age, something happening, and girl’s disappearing for a while — Whippings kept us so afraid that we gave no thoughts to human passion, high school sweethearts, even leaving home.  Every body knew that we were leaving from the first brother, but we said little about it until it was almost time to go.

My beloved old friends of the last cotton crops, I am longing to hear from you, and those of you who consider my book, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” to be an assault on our problems as we grew in to manhood and womanhood;  Please look again, for you are not looking at what the pages are telling you, and that is more children are suffering now, and the abused and battered of both sexes has grown steadily along with every crime against human kind imaginable in a place where we did not even put a latch on the screen door on a hot summer night.  Children are no longer heading for the cotton field in October, but it has left a deep sadness where land once loved is covered with human throw aways, and the little homes have gone to ruin even along my old home road, so I am requesting that we who felt troubled before take a look at what came after mid-century, for we are condoning the rape of the land we left behind simply by pretending people are no longer there.

It is frightening to think that there may be no way to help, that standing in the darkness and seeing America continue t ignore the poor which make up many border counties of middle Tennessee and Northern Alabama, along with ancestors from Sand Mountain all the way to coal country, it is not the color of your skin, but it is that there is no money for help, and throwing money is not going to fix it anyway without the rebirth of people’s finding pride in what they can make, what they can grow, and changing the goals of school children who are looked down up on if they must get meals at school instead of approaching all of these things as learning experiences where natural resources are used from a school garden to the school table where all students would participate in learning the gifts of the elders..

Young people can learn to sew, to cook, to clean, and to have reason to spend extra time in shop repairing school property.  If you value that you have power to help change the situation which rewards bad behavior by throwing money at the situation with no labor, then we have missed a great chance for once to go in and to help Appalachian families learn the value of what they own.  We send kids abroad to dig wells and let the run off of poorly run industries bring higher cancer levels among the poor.  Is this the trickle down effect, and are certain Americans just dispensable, because they have lost their way through generations of welfare and pathetic medical care.  I am asking folks, and I am not telling you what to do about southern poverty as it exist with dying Appalachian towns replaced by boulevards of noisy cars and Walyouknowwhats, and I am asking the ones who were in the fields with me where they have gone, for it is no shame to have been the best with what you were given.  I will always love my old home place, and those of you who brought in the crops with us, my story, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” on Amazon which is Kindle ready and available through Create Space is apt to make you uneasy, for it was not easy;  “Was it?”  It was not alright for America to have seen us as disposable younger folks, and it is not alright that we forget the generations behind us do not even know what any one of us could do — Feed ourselves at the labor of our hands.  Organic gardening began with us;  Oh, Alice Waters;  You must know that.  We lived on organic foods, spring water, and milk from a bucket, but it just so happens we did not have any money to show how clever we are and that independent living was the way of life in the south before you, Ms. Waters, got your nice new training pants.  I ask you, those of you who gather those bolls with me until your hands cracked with frost;  Please let me hear from you through Xanga, Amazon, or wherever you are, and I would like to hear what is happening in the communities from where you came, and I hope that you will bless me, as I will bless you — For doing the best that you possibly could and to give up the shame for having been a poor white American along with our poor black neighbors who left north before us;  For then the world looked like it might be a hard place to be in down the road.

Appalachian Writer, Barbara Everett Heintz – Author, “Pinkhoneysuckle”
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As the author of my book, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” I am delighted for you to visit my Amazon and Kindle site.  It is my great hope that you will read some of the free information in this coming of age story about a girl, then a woman who lives and walks with the demons of a 3rd world life inflicted on so many southern families along The Appalachian Trail, especially before the interstate highway system came in, and the small towns had all the old home place were businesses destroyed due to the influx of mega chain stores, but the mid century brought the worst of loses when a way of life was destroyed by the United States government’s willingness to destroy small farming, plus cutting the lifeline bases of cotton and tobacco in the south, especially which had not even fully recovered from The Civil War.

The southern men who only knew farm life had to give up home and family or worse — move the on to the northern states where the factories were putting out cars and steel, products from coal and iron, and men who did back breaking labor then could only do the unskilled jobs being fully unprepared for the factories.  Through one woman’s life, you may find an America which you never knew existed, and their are towns and villages that are almost ghost towns at this point with only fragments of once popular town squares left where all business was done.

You will laugh, and you will cry, and you will gain something the history books have told little about, the migration north and the death of southern farm life.  You will see how one kind of prohibition was replaced by worse, and you will read a story which more than one person has suggested should become an American movie and is written in a way as such as it can easily be adapted to the movie screen.

See why the judges in The Snn Francisco saw fit to give first honorable mention in the only category the author entered, and why she will enter more categories in Hollywood California this July at The Hollywood Book Festival 2012, and I modestly tell you that I am that timid author.  I believe in my story as a means of letting the world know that one needs to get off the main roads to see America.  Please go out among the few farm families left, and you will find that many are lost.

Drop in on a country church on Sunday, and have brothers and sisters of that church shake your hand and weep with joy that you have come to worship with them.  As in all places;  Check in with the local officials to let them know that you are there, and they will help you know places which you may wish to see and what you might prefer to stay away from.  I gladly ask you to take the exit off of I-24 to Winchester, and see the wonderful old town theater, and of the beautiful Highway 64 that takes you close to where I spent all the days of my youth, and you will be driving along with the Southern most tip of the Appalachians in plain view.  This was the area that had some prosperity and still does.

Here and there are old remnants of the Civil War, and hardly a town you go through will not have the graves of their beloved Civil War dead.  America is not one large travel brochure, and many of us grew up in circumstances which were more archaic than city tenements in the old countries which we left.  Please buy from the Farmers Markets, and bother to say hello and tell them where you are from, for I know these people, and my parents lie among them in a cemetary called Walnut Grove.  All of the life I knew has gone, and trash now dots many pastoral scenes, for the self sufficient lives we lived were not thought of as valuable then, and the goal was store bought food as a treat now and then.

“Pinkhoneysuckle,” dares to tell you the ugly truth of what happened through one daughter of the south where we did slave labor for wages unheard of since the children were worked in city factories like adults in the 19th century.   I do not want you to know what all of the book is fiction and what is real, but I will tell you that when it comes to the work part;  My family was born to be field hands, and that was our expected place.   Our folks gave us over to other family members who would use us in the same way they would any families who had nothing, and the children whose fathers were unable to go to the second world war had the least identity of all white or black.  Please see why honorable judges would see greatness in a book that I wrote in less than two years, for when your heart is in a place, then it is easy to transfer it to the written word. 

Read what is free, or give it a chance, please, with Kindle; Renting is a new and difficult blow to new writers, but we who keep reaching and telling you that it is worth your time shall prevail, for the books speak for themselves. You may reach me through Xanga, and I do write those who take the time to write me in good faith, and if it takes offering small gifts for purchasing the book;  I can do that for citizens of the USA with apologies to my European public, but the postage is simply insurmountable unless you are purchasing books for a group, and then I could send the small treasures which I have.  I have charming beads, bookmarks, small cosmetics, and many things to share when I do book shows, so I hope to meet you there.

Thank you for your time.  Barbara Everett Heintz, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” Amazon/ Kindle Ready, Create Space, and more Independent carriers to come.  I am willing to sell it if you contact me through Xanga messaging for fourteen dollars which would include your postage and a small token of my appreciation.

I would fail my book not to mention that it is filled with mystery and also love stories.  Let me hear from you.

Blessings

I was a Protestant convert to Catholicism many years ago, for something about its root in Ancient History touched me deeply, and it still does for that matter.  During this May, a month of closeness for Mary, The Mother of God, if you believe in the Trinity; God – The Father, Christ – The Son; Christ Risen -The Holy Spirit; Then that is the way of it — Three present in One; But Mary has been very mystical, appearing in the most unlikely places and at unexpected times.

Maybe it was my last year’s near death experience, but I have been wanting to hear of a visitation;  Perhaps I have wanted to be the visited, but more than any other season, I have thought of her now,  Is it mere happenstance that in the items of Health and Beauty a gilded genuine rose and vase came up, and I thought of making bids on it, but I stopped,  It was far too tangible, and if the Mother of God is present; then the scent of the rose is often a sign, but you do not go out and purchase them.

It is free to all of those who hunger and thirst, a farce according to many Protestants, but she comes; An apparition occurs, and the world gathers in that place.  Let it come to us, for we are needing such a Holy presence, and even in my Protestant upbringing, I knew of signs and wonders which came upon the summer’s air.

Barbara Everett Heintz — Author, “Pinkhoneysuckle”