Features

Blog Post Ideas and Topics for Your Small Business Website

Many small businesses here in Floyd have business sites with blogs integrated into them. [Read more »]

Handing Off the Future: What Will Be Their Legacy?

I lift two heavy buckets of green beans fresh from the garden up onto the kitchen sink. The knees of my old worn kakis are dark-wet from kneeling to pick while the long green pods still drip with morning’s brief shower. Soon I will hear the hiss and rattle of the canner, the seal of completion on our gardening committment, completed while the low sun still casts long shadows west across the pasture. [Read more »]

Front Porch View of Floyd County Spring

The coming of spring at our house is not measured by length of day or temperature. It is not the blooming of Coltsfoot (come far too early this year) or pinking of the buds at the tips of trees along Nameless Creek that signals spring to us. The first day of spring at my house is marked by the afternoon or evening of our first meal of the year on the front porch. [Read more »]

Familiarity Breeds Respect

Yes, I know the saying says otherwise. And I have known people, jobs and towns where, the more I learned about them…. well, we do sometimes come to despise that which has become too comfortable, too familiar. But maybe it is more often true in my experience that ‘familiarity breeds respect’, and this has entered my thoughts this week as I have pondered how answer a sincere question posed to me by a regular Fragments reader. [Read more »]

Playing Outside the Box

The building that had once been a sprawling grocery store was now a brightly-colored entertainment megaplex called “the Children’s Fun Palace”. The parking lot was filled with cars. None of us knew what to expect on this first visit, but it was obviously the place to be on a warm, April day in the Midwestern town where my daughter lives.
[Read more »]

Better Without Batteries

My friend Bobby and I were deposited one Alabama summer afternoon at his Aint Tink’s and told to “go play.” Though neither of us really knew how, we decided to fish in a small creek nearby. We figured it out as we went along and used what we could find close by–a crooked stick, a few feet of sewing thread and a safety pin scrounged from a bedroom dresser drawer. For bait, wild blackberries. Surely fish liked fruit. [Read more »]

Help for Women in the New River Valley

The Women’s Resource Center of the New River Valley

Crisis Hotline 639-1123
Help when you want it. Hope when you need it. 24 hours a day. [Read more »]

A Hot FloydFest Date

At first I thought my husband, Joe, had sold his soul to the FloydFest devil.

Since he took the job of coordinating parking at the festival, I hadn’t seen him for days. For the past five years, he’s volunteered his time in exchange for a weekend pass, but this year, as the Floyd High soccer coach, he signed on to head up one of the hardest behind the scenes jobs. In exchange the FF promoters will make a substantial donation to the soccer program. [Read more »]

Floyd Fest 2007 Images

Here are some images from Floyd Fest 6, a 4-day music festival which was held in July of 2007 right off the Blue Ridge Parkway in southwest Virginia.

123►

What the Hail?!

It is a beautiful late spring day in Floyd County and though it feels like summer, the Summer Solstice is still ten days away.

A storm cloud approached, the trees swayed and leaves blew in the wind. The storm blew over so we continued with our outside chores; Scott mulching an asparagus bed and red raspberry patch, while I removed all traces of bindweed from a long row of flowers. [Read more »]