I figure there’s no better way to start this new series than with a Daughter of Appalachia that I’ve been missing hard lately. A dear friend of mine who passed away a few weeks ago. She would’ve been 88 this month.

I first met Pat Casdorph around seven years ago. I’d just moved to the neighborhood and was walking my dogs when a boat of an Buick came cruising slowly down the hill. The top of someone’s head barely visible over the steering wheel. It stopped right in the middle of the road, the window creaked down, and I was greeted with “Hi, I’m Pat Casdorph. Oh, just look at them. Aren’t they sweet?” She told me the pups were precious and how she didn’t understand “how anyone could not love little animals.”

I’d already heard about Pat from some of the other neighbors. They weren’t happy that she was feeding the deer that roamed around. She’d buy fifty-pound bags of grain corn, mix it in a bucket with honey or syrup, and feed them. The deer came at the same time each day and walked right up to her. One day she wasn’t outside at their feeding time, and one almost walked into her house, through the door she’d left propped open. If she was out of corn, she’d find something else for them to eat. Sometimes she’d dump a box of Cheerios out in the yard for them. She’d tell me, “People say, ‘Now Pat, why do you feed everything that comes to your house. And I tell them I just can’t let the little animals go hungry. This is as much their place as it is ours” 

I walked past Pat’s house with my dogs almost every day. We became fast friends. If she was home, we’d stop and visit. She lived alone, with her cat Mozart. She filled her days with reading, daily walks, visiting her friends, and driving the loop every evening.

Patricia Ilene Casdorph was born in Boone County, West Virginia in 1936. She grew up in Ashford, a small coal camp town on the Coal River, with mountains on all sides. She told me that when she was two years old, her daddy was killed in the mines when a piece of slate fell on him. She was the baby of five girls, but her mother didn’t really like girls, so Pat and her four sisters went to live with her Auntie Alice and Uncle Della, also in Ashford. She said there weren’t better people in the world than Alice and Della. They called her Cotton Top and she was spoiled, even though they didn’t have much. 

In Ashford, coal trucks were always flying up and down the road. When Pat was eight years old, she was walking home from school and one of the trucks hit her. She said they were always flying up and down the road. She was knocked unconscious, and her leg badly broken. She was in a cast for months and missed school for most of the year. She was lonely, not able to leave the house much while she was healing up, but her school friends brought her work to her, so she wouldn’t fall behind.

After high school, Pat helped teach kindergarten in the next town over at Nellis School. She later moved to Charleston and worked as a secretary at West Virginia State College for over twenty-five years. She met her husband Paul there, a professor and chairman of the History department. Paul always called her Barker, her maiden name. He was a ham radio enthusiast, historian, and an author, so he was always researching and writing. They didn’t have children and traveled all over the country together. Paul couldn’t drive because of a health issue, so she drove, while he sat in the backseat “with all his papers.” She said those were good days.

Once in a while Pat would have a day where she felt down and lonely. She called it discombobulated. She’d talk about how sometimes it felt like Paul had just died and other times it felt like forever ago. She said that it used to drive her crazy, but she’d give anything to hear him tinkering with his old radios.

Most days, Pat was in good spirits. In the summer we’d sit on her porch and drink sweet tea (she made the best.) On humid days she’d say, “As the old timers used to say, it’s close out here.”

In the winter we’d sit in her living room with our coffee. Sometimes her leg hurt bad from when it was broken, even eighty years later. She said she didn’t think it ever healed quite right. But she’d say she couldn’t complain, she could still get up and go and that was something.

She kept two folding chairs sitting in her garage, ready for company. The aluminum kind with crisscross webbing. One day we sat there and watched the rain pour. She unironically said it was a beautiful day. No matter what the weather, she’d always say, “Isn’t this a nice day? They’re all nice days.”