the crowd
muffet and todd
jeremy
ann, dudley, frank, barbara
selma and ann
dudley
muffet and dudley
Another wine tasting at Selma's Backwoods Bean Coffee Shop in Sparta. She has a wine tasting the last Friday of the month 6-9. Four different wines to taste, all of them red tonight. I'm not one to fuss over wine and go oo-ah about the bouquet and all the fruity flavor talk. It was good wine. It's all good. I go for the company, to see people I like to see in the coffee shop to visit with. I've not been to town much over the last month or so and don't get to see people like JoEllen and Todd, Dudley and Muffet, others and several not there tonight. The coffee shop has been for me a place where I have made new friends and where I go to see different ones I know who frequent the place. Joe Allen Delp is often there in the mornings. I enjoy conversation with Joe Allen, a mountain boy whose stories of past adventures make the people from Away look at him in wonderment that anyone could be so wild, and Joe Allen wasn't necessarily wild compared to what wild can be. The people that are really wild don't go into coffee shops.
I spent most of my time this evening with Todd Smith, the holistic chiropractor in town, and his wife, JoEllen, people I enjoy a great deal, both equally. And talked with Dudley a good bit and Muffet. Dudley has been a friend for about 10 years. When I started the radio show, I went to Dudley to teach me how to work the mechanics of putting on a radio show. He was a radio producer in Washington DC for his adult life. Retired to Alleghany. His wife, Caroline, had advanced MS and he took care of her like a mother with her baby up to the very last day. I can't say he's to be commended. He was doing what comes natural. Caroline went on last year after some time in the nursing home, and it wasn't much later Muffet turned up from Indiana. She and Dudley had been close years ago before either of them was married. Both are unmarried now and have come back together. They're setting out on a long driving tour of USA and Canada, keeping a blog during the trip to be viewed by invitation only.
I knew half the people in there, or less, and was comfortable, among friendly people, everyone open for conversation, and conversation flowing around the room free of blockage. It felt like the right number of people. Not too many and not too few. A lightness was in the air tonight. It seemed like everyone was in an even temperament, happy to be among the people they were with. The finger food was good, the bread especially. I was happy to see a clarity in the air, telling me the coffee shop has taken on a clear, happy energy, Selma's goddess energy. She is the soul of the place and the air in there is as clear as the air around Selma. It's her radiance that draws everyone there and keeps them returning often. The coffee shop is about the only thing happening in Sparta besides the Jubilee on Tuesday and Saturday nights. It continues to mesmerize me that the coffee shop in Sparta has the spirit inside of someplace in Europe or South America. It is a universal feeling in there. Races and nationalities figure as nothing, merely identity. Like Quan Yin, Selma is a goddess of compassion. I don't even need to expand on that. It's just how it is.
selma
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