Great site, Rt 11. Made me sniffle, remembering my cousin Leontyne's country store at the edge of my grandparents' property in Mountain, WV. As a child, rather than spending the time playing with some other dorky boy cousins(I was 4 through 10 at that time, what did I know, other than boys........YUCK!) I instead had a fairly permanent roost on the red metal Coca-Cola Chest and discount prices on any pop or Jolly Rancher candy I chose to ingest.(Think I was the youngest person in existence, with a perennially full grocery tab.)My favorite time of the day there was from 10 am to about 3 am, when several of the old men took a "Leontyne's" vacation there and sat around in reed and wicker rocking chairs and complained about their children, their wives, told hunting and fishing tales, and reminisced about WW1.........no wonder my outlook on life is skewed.
I learned useful things too, such as the edict: childbirth ain't for men, how to play "Turkey in the Straw" on a fiddle, several square dance moves to try out at the Grange's Saturday night Hootenanny, and ALL the verses of "Barnacle Bill the Sailor" which was useful later on when I attended college keg parties. Also the local gossip was much more juicy, coming from these men who told it exactly as they saw it, much more salacious than any hen party the Grange Auxillary ever had.
Being quite the entrepreneur at that time, I became the "Goddess of the Brass Spitoon" and kept it emptied, in return for a Grapette or a bag of Mister Bee potato chips. I also earned more booty by keeping Leontyne's supply of fishing nightcrawlers, by going down by the "CRICK" and mining for the buggers. I was always faithful in swiping my cousins' soda pop bottles, usually before they had drank the contents and turning them in for the deposit. Survival of the fittest, ya know.
Although Leontyne has been gone since I was 11 or 12, her store still stands as a kind of mausoleum to the good old days, complete with oak and glass shelves and accoutrements and the 1948 issue coca-cola chest, unused, but still a real statement of comfort for me. I snitched the brass spitoon many years ago and have a spider plant in it.
