Summer days were shady but muggy at Warwood, my paternal great-grandparents’ home, tucked into a mountainside whose natural springs fed Glenns Run in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle.
As kids in the 1960s, we’d visit often to keep the overbrush at bay, mow the grass and hear tales of Warwood’s past, including those of a coal mine, a mountaintop golf course, horseshoe courts and concrete-lined goldfish ponds long shuttered, long overgrown and long dry.
The work was hard but the rewards were sweet. There always was a tall Boston Cooler (root beer over vanilla ice cream). And if the work was to take the day, a fried-chicken dinner from Great Aunt Mary’s old iron skillets always left full bellies little and large.
The family’s Independence Day celebration moved to Warwood in the 1970s. Brother Shannon reintroduced pyrotechnics to the gathering. Family elders dusted off a blast from the past — two small homemade cannons from the 1930s.
Nobody’s ever said whether it was by sheer engineering genius or by serendipity, but the green apples of each July 4 were the perfectly sized ammunition. The creek across the road was the goal. But hitting a passing car was a prize, too.
Warwood is long gone; how troubling it remains on return visits to see only the slide of a mountainside where, at one point, five generations of Family McNickle so regularly gathered. There is an abject sadness in the silence of a place that once hosted such love, laughter and hijinx.
But there are two mementos.
There’s a small birdhouse made of shake siding from Grandma Nick and Pap Pap’s house that hangs from my front porch. It “attended” elder daughter Taylor’s Outer Banks wedding five years ago, representing her forefathers.
Then there’s one of those Independence Day cannons – with the July 4, 1933, date of its debut inked on the side – that graces my fireplace mantel each Fourth.
And if you put your ear to each just so, you can hear the voices of Warwood’s past, if not the “PLUNK!” and the “THUD!” of the apples connecting with their moving targets — one wet, others steel.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
