The very name of the town, Walkers Pasture, has a story. Here’s the short version: In 1895, Mr. Walter Walker dug a coal mine in his hilly, overgrown cow pasture. Among the men who worked that mine were my great-grandfather, my grandfather, one of my uncles, and my own father. Even with all those strong Ryuan men helping out, it took them nearly a century to strip the mine bare. When that happened, the mine was closed, and the state of West Virginia renamed the area The Wholly Incorporated Town of Walkers Pasture. A town? This patch of land? Not really, it was (and pretty much still is) just a few hundred tract houses built during LBJ’s War on Poverty. There’s a one-woman post office the size of a horse stall, a good diner with decent coffee, a fairly small grammar school, a fairly large opioid problem, and mostly neat front yards, with only an occasional shell of a rusted Chevy Malibu for decoration.

I know it would sound insane to my city-raised friends, but I actually had a good time growing up there. Maybe it was my basic aggressiveness, because I just didn’t let people get under my tough skin. Sure, the town has its share of substance abuse issues, but most of us only smoked weed and drank rye whiskey for our highs, my brother and his buddies being the exception to that.

All that aside, the biggest reason for my good memories of Walkers Pasture is my family. My childhood was a happy one because of my mom, a tiny, super-smart woman known to almost everyone in her world as Big Lucy.

I was the only help Big Lucy had in caring for her long-dying husband and her drugged-out son. I worked hard, but Big Lucy worked so much harder. I won’t say she was always smiling, but I will say that she rarely cried. She poured herself two snorts of Jim Beam every night, then she and Mr. Beam settled down in front of the CBS news programs. She watched the news so intensely that Daddy used to say she could, at any moment, fill in for the secretary of state. Later on, my mom would say ten Hail Marys in front of her plastic Lady of Fatima statue. She was and is one of a kind.

Big Lucy is still a certified midwife, but she doesn’t do much birthing anymore. When she started out helping women with their deliveries, most of her births took place in houses—in beds and on couches and tables and floors. When she wasn’t catching babies, Big Lucy worked at a nursing home in Parkersburg. Her only fun time seemed to be her alternate Saturday nights with her friend Audrey, the two of them playing the slot machines at the Wheeling Island Casino.