From the West

We have a stack of wood out back on the patio - the "back forty" I guess you could say (forty square feet).  It's a nice and dry and somewhat smallish pile.  We have two fireplaces in the house - one in the living room and one right above the living room.  In the kitchen.  The wood wouldn't last very long in a continuous burn.   Maybe a day or two.  But it will be nice for "atmosphere" over a few evenings during the late fall or winter.  Not today though. Today it should be in the mid-60s.  In fact I was surprised how warm it was this morning when I stepped out the door onto Abingdon Drive to walk with Kooper.   Good day for football.  Although it rained last night and more is coming later today from the west.  Over the mountains.

That's where the wood came from we were told by its seller.  The mountains of Virginia.

Every night a train comes along the railroad tracks about a quarter of a mile north of the house.   The train brings something from the mountains, too - coal.  It pulls up next to a power plant located along the Potomac River.  It unloads its coal and then goes back west.  Empty.  To be refilled for the next trip on the next night.

The coal comes from the mountains of West Virginia.  Past the Virginia Blue Ridge.  There are fewer and fewer mountains in West Virginia these days.  Mountaintop mining is seeing to that.  An easy, cheap way to mine coal.  An easy, cheap way to run the computers and light the lights and heat the houses and power the bureaucracies of the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

That is what the train brings every day.  In the dark of the night.  When our lights are burning.  Its hauls in the mountain from West Virginia.  Then the mountains go up in smoke the next day.