Rural Legend

I received notice that my short story, Rural Legend, a tale I’d penned back in 1999, had won first place at the Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Symposium for 2014. This honor means more to me than words can express. Not only for the honor itself, but because the story itself is, for the most legendary part, true as the proverbial Gospel.

Rural Legend

(reprised and revisited, 2014)

            Poor Naomi Proffitt had come down with the worst kind of homesickness, the sort for which she had found no cure. She longed for a place she had never been, a home to which she could not return, a haven that didn’t exist upon this earth. There is no word that I know of to describe such an aching grief, but Naomi had it just the same.

It was the summer of 1929, a sultry afternoon in dog days when not even…