{Coal+Cheese|Coal} Week 2/52

When I think of WV as home, it brings up many, many memories and some of those memories are arranged around coal.   I can't write this a pretend that I love mountain top removal or even seeing a strip mine in the distance, but those are my things. I'm not even going to entertain the political side of this argument, because like it or not, it keeps your lights on.Coal mining is cultural here. It's away of life and there is a lot of pride, accomplishment and nostalgia wrapped up in it.  I know it's feed my family for years.  I'd say it's a safe bet that in this part of the country, we all know someone in the mines or someone that's worked in it and we all know the mining stories, some good, some bad, some tragic.

  I've had grandfathers who mined, I  I had an uncle who drove coal trucks for many years, and  have an uncle and a cousin who still do it.  I can never officially say that I was a coal miners daughter, but my dad did drive coal trucks when I was younger.  I still remember being 4-5 years old  and driving up Anjean to see my dad on his lunch breaks(or on the many occasions that he'd forget something he needed, we'd drive it up to him).   I also remember riding in his truck a couple of times.  There was no passenger seat, but he had a bucked turned over and I'd sit on that. Well, sit is an overstatement, seeing as I'd actually bump off it and fly through the cab of the truck more than I remained on the bucket.  I remember coal dirt and the fact that mom would make him leave his boots at the door. 

To shoot this assignment, I played over many different  set ups in my mind and a lot of them involved coal.  Finding it wasn't a problem(we have two buckets of it in outside and my aunt has a garage full of it), but figuring out how I related to it was.  Then I saw the dinner bucket in my room. I actually found the bucket in an antique store in Montana, but when I found it made me think of home and made me think of my dad. That  lunch bucket,  honestly made me homesick for days. I don't know whose bucket this is and rather than coal mines, I'm sure it found it's way into gold and silver mines around the Rockies. Also,  I know a lot of miners lunch buckets were actually that, round buckets and if I remember right, they'd sit on them during lunch, that is if they could sit up.  Dad's bucket looked more like a the one I bought in Missoula, and I remember watching mom pack it, dad forget it and us driving it too him.   So this is where this assignment brought me. I took that unknown man's bucket out to the tracks that are right behind my house and sat with it for a few minutes on a very, very cold January morning and thought about coal and what it means to me. Coal is ambiguous, being many different things to many different people.It's this old black clump of history's left overs and it's alseep in the ground, but the people who dig it up, load it up and deliver it, bring it to life with stories and some of those stories belong to me.