Miriam: How do people mostly know you in the pagan community?
Elspeth: I am Elspeth of Haven. The entity that we have founded is the Haven Community Church, ATC. It is not a physical place; it is not even a specific group; it is an amorphous dream. The center of it is to be a landed, sustainable community, probably with the land to be bought within the next six or eight months.
M: What originally brought you to paganism?
E: Meeting Nybor, my husband. I had become nonspiritual after being raised Methodist and baptized in water from the River Jordan. Both of my parents were very focused on the church and expected me to be a minister's wife and a missionary. And I am, in a funny way.
Both of them having made their transition from this plane, I imagine they see what I'm doing and feel pretty comfortable about it. When we get beyond the body, we see the oneness of all of it.
I had always been fascinated with unicorns and King Arthur and the concept of fairies and that sort of thing, and of course with the old gods. I felt attached to them, but I felt that that was all gone. Then I met this very good-looking man - who was not named Nybor then - and he said, "It's a living religion, and I'm a practicing pagan." It was like a door opening into a very familiar place.
I felt like I had come home.
M: What inspired you to start putting on your Crone workshops?
E: I guess I saw a real need to take the concept of Crone - the old wise woman - and not only acknowledge Her as a face of the Goddess, but also to begin looking around at old women whom we might know, and begin to honor their knowledge and to respect them.
At 67, I'm not totally a crone. I'm still in whatever it is, I call it Matriarch stage, between Mother and Crone. One of the magickal means of defining a crone is the second Saturn return, which is 58. Nevertheless, I still feel that I'm very much still in a number of other places. But, as Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki said to me, "You are woman, which is more than any one face and incorporates all the faces of the Goddess."
The Crone stage seems to me to be a place for us to raise our personal consciousness of what a crone is - because all old women are not crones - and what the Crone face of the Goddess is. We have to look at the face that is the handmaiden to death.
As the Dark Lady, she is the one who gives us those gifts that we would rather not have, those things in life that are our necessary lessons to be learned. We set ourselves in place to learn them, but if given the opportunity we would avoid them, because we don't want things that are hard. We don't want painful things. We would like to have everything pretty, and it can't be.
To me, this is the face of the Goddess that allows us to look at happenings in our life as a gift and not a hindrance, and it is my feeling that once we have acknowledged them and lifted them up to Her in thanksgiving, we can begin to graduate from the pain and be able to use the lesson.
M: How long have you been doing your Crone workshop?
E: About four years.
M: Do both men and women attend the workshop?
E: Both men and women. In fact, if they give me a chance on the program I emphasize it is not solely for crones, it is about crones. Everyone needs this learning. We have a small sprinkling of men, almost always two or three. I don't know why men feel that they have no place here. Maybe part of our problem is the male reluctance to look at the Crone as an important part of either the Goddess or the females surrounding him.
M: What kinds of reactions do you tend to get from workshop-goers?
E: With that particular workshop, it ranges from, "Gee that was nice," "I really enjoyed it," "Thank you very much," which is how a big percentage in any workshop reacts, to extremely moved in places. People frequently finish that ritual in tears and feeling that they have faced things that they didn't ever attempt to face before. Frequently a growth experience comes out of that.
I'm thinking of the ending ritual more than the rest of it, but for all of it people say, "I hadn't thought about So-and-so." At the part where we say, "Have you ever known a crone?," where people are allowed to speak of crones they've known, they sometimes discover, within themselves, women they have known whom they didn't particularly honor in the beginning. Now they do.
Also, the act of bringing together a conversation about what constitutes a crone in this plane enables us to look at older women as valuable: as repositories of wisdom and of the stories of their youth, and repositories of the kind of wisdom that comes of not only years but many kinds of experiences. What the Crone has to give us all is her long view, having seen it happen time and time again. Knowing that though we are each one individual, our experiences are almost a copy of each other, frequently. Certain things lead us to certain experiences, and she can say to herself, "I saw her daddy go through that." "I remember when So-and-so was young; he was the same way as that young boy is." She can give us an option to talk to young people; she can help a lot of us to avoid some of the cycles.
You know, it is said that we must learn history, or we're doomed to repeat it. This is the place the Crone and the Sage can be valuable to our younger people, saying, "Here. This is history. This happened. You don't have to do this same thing again."
M: How would you define a crone?
E: To me, a crone is an older woman who has lived a life full of experiences and full of service to the community, because if she is not serving the community, whatever the community constitutes, she is simply functioning within herself. But service is a lot of it, in one form or another.
As maiden, she served herself and her lover. As mother, she served by raising children; her nurturing is done for individual children, whether they're children of birth or other nurturing. Then as crone, she begins to serve the larger community. She is not only the one who knows "when the oak leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, it's time to plant the corn," but she also knows "this kind of teenage behavior is typical, don't sweat it." She knows how to make a decision on an argument between two people, because she has seen this sort of thing happen. And she has at that point, one would assume, the authority to do so.
But she is also the representative of the people to the outside world. This is where the Crone and the Sage stand with the tribe or clan. They are the representatives, the leaders who go out and meet with leaders of other groups, or the outer world, and represent their people. So it's a very strong tradition, but a very responsible tradition. She had better be awfully sure of where she's coming from.
Mostly, I think the crone is a woman who's lived long enough to recognize we're all mostly foolish, and the humor that we have is humor that laughs at ourselves.
And she is a woman who has claimed her power. She is no longer in the trap of the patriarchy, of regarding herself as valuable only as men perceive her, but instead as valuable within herself.
She has come to full goddesshood. She incorporates the Maiden. All right, some crones don't exhibit that as much as others, but she has the Maiden within. She has not left her. She has incorporated her. All the aspects of the Mother, and all the aspects of the matriarch of the clan, are enclosed in this. The Crone and the Maiden, Kore and Persephone, are two faces of the same coin. This is the mystery of the transformation of the Goddess. The Crone and the Maiden are almost the same person. The Mother stands separate, but the Crone, while she will die in the body, as Goddess she transforms into Maiden again in the spring.
So I see this as a very important development in our time. To redeem the whole of the Goddess, we must redeem the Crone, bring her back into a position of power. Now, power in the feminine is not power over; it is power from within, which is leadership, is kindliness, is acknowledging the value of all, even a child. As an individual, everybody is valuable. All of the Mother's other children are valuable, and I see the Crone's power as leading us into our next step.
I believe we are in the time of the Crone, as the Earth is about to make her next transformation into her new springtime. And she is saying to us, "The cookie jar is here, your rewards are all available to you, if you do your job right." Our task is to reclaim our stewardship, not to exhibit any more power over anything, but to acknowledge our responsibility to each other as humans, to all the green people and the four-legged, winged and finned. To those beings, and to the Earth, we are the stewards. This is our task, and we've sure made a mess of it so far.
M: The Crone has a lot of darkness associated with her. As you say, she's the handmaiden to death. How do the dark goddesses manifest for you? What does that say to you?
E: It says that death is part of the cycle, that without darkness nobody gets any rest. Darkness is the time that our creative force is at its strongest. It's the battery that enables the light.
Let me distinguish this. There's a current thing going on, particularly in the pagan world, that says the dark side of us is what we've come to call the evil side or the dangerous side. I'm not looking at that. I'm looking at darkness as being that which we hide from ourselves, that which our culture hides from us. It may be some things that are difficult to accept, but mostly it's the things that we suffer pain with or we don't want to deal with. Our angers, our selfishness, the things that we don't want to deal with within ourselves, that is the darkness.
I don't think the Crone would bring it out into the light, necessarily. If dealt with properly, acknowledged and looked at clearly with the light, the darkness does not need to act upon these things, it needs to serve as the force that keeps us going.
This is part of my new effort to go into the New Age world with a lecture on eco-spirituality.
It comes from this: In February, my knee was operated on in Tucson, Arizona, and three days later I had to drive to California. I did not feel a lot of pain. Well, I asked my shaman teacher, Can sodium penethol be a break-way to the other world? And she said, Anything can be when you're ready.
For about two days, I wandered in the desert out there, kind of kept losing the road. I wasn't lost. A lot of things came through, and one is a vision of two swords, a sword of light and a sword of darkness and shadow, going into a flame and whirling round and round. What was thrown out was a single sword that was like Damascene steel. It had shadows of dark and light all over it in a pattern.
This to me was a really important message, not only for the teaching that I'm going to be doing but for all of us. We have to stop denying the shadow and incorporate it in what we're doing, which does not mean to give it power over, but to bring that battery close to the surface so that we can work with it, so we can acknowledge it. If it's something you're ashamed of or have forgotten about or feel is dangerous or something, you don't need to bring it to have power over the light, but to bring it out and look at it and use that which is in fact to empower your work.
M: How do you plan to incorporate this learning into your workshop on eco-spirituality?
E: One of the problems that paganism has with the New Age people is that they appear to be white light and soft bunnies. We need to move together. I feel it is vital that all spiritual people acknowledge the value of each other, Native Americans, New Age, Christians who are open to being ecumenical and certainly the earth-centered religions of all sorts.
I'm using "earth-centered" specifically because I don't feel "pagan" describes anything. Most of the people practicing earth religions are urban or suburban, and we can't legitimately use that word, which only means country people. And we never used that word anyway. It was actually used originally for the weird people who came into the city in Rome to worship a dead man on a cross. Silly pagani. And then when Constantine on his death-bed named Rome a Christian city, it became Christian, the word immediately got transferred to people who worshipped the old gods.
Our relationship to the old gods and to the Earth should show us that the dark balances the light, and we are not any of us made up of one kind of thing. For everything that we do, there has to be an ending for new beginnings to happen. This will be part of the eco-spirituality workshop, because spirituality means to acknowledge that our involvement with the Earth involves death, that death is a part of life. We plant the seeds, we nourish the seeds and allow them to grow, and we harvest. Harvest is a death. And until we acknowledge that death is a part of life, we don't have the empowerment that it gives us.
That's part of it. It won't be the total focus, but part of an effort to bring into that world that life is both dark and light, summer and winter, cold and hot. Then perhaps we'll move closer to an ability to be good stewards of all that we're given.
M: What would more Crone energy or shadow energy bring to this society?
E: We would stop hiding from ourselves. I think that hypocrisy and lying are two of the most damaging things that humans can do. We do it all the time.
Our idea of perfection seems to disregard the shadow sides of ourselves. But we've got to acknowledge the shadow and use that in a way that is positive. Balance is what we're after; balance is I believe a core part of anything we should be teaching. We must balance negative and positive energy. I think in nature there is a balance. There is the rending of bodies by other animals, but it is a natural and expected thing.
But psychologically, we want our leaders to be better than we are. We put them on pedestals and believe they are better, and yet the other half of that is we take delight in finding the human factor and tearing them down. No one is all of a piece. Nobody is one kind of thing. Each of us may be much more balanced to negative energy than to positive energy and need to be guided and taught. But humans have created so much negativity with our angers and our hatreds of others and the insanity of this time of destruction. To my mind, a lot of what is happening around us we have, in effect, caused by creating a preponderance of negativity.
It sounds like a paradox, and it is, that we must acknowledge our shadow self and at the same time not create any more negativity. But life is made up of paradoxes.
M: While you have been introducing people to the Crone, what prejudices have you encountered?
E: I'll give you a good one. If she's still beautiful and if she's carefully made up, has dyed hair and a made-up face, keeps her figure and so on, everybody says, "No, she's not a crone." One of the questions that I ask is: "Is Elizabeth Taylor a crone?" Everywhere but in California, I get one or two people who say yes, and almost everybody says no immediately. In California, it constituted a 20-minute argument. Nobody else paid much attention to the question.
The truth of the matter is none of us, unless we are in the community with a woman and she is working with us, know whether a woman is really acting as a crone. We cannot make a judgment. We're that far from Elizabeth Taylor, and we don't know anything except what is presented by her publicity agent.
Another prejudice is, "My grandmother was not a crone because she was cross and ugly all the time." That may be. Did she teach you anything?
But women have not claimed their power in this stage. That's not as much a prejudice as a statement. Within the culture in which we are embedded, old women have not traditionally claimed their power. We fell for the judgment of, "You were beautiful when you were young, you had children, you raised them, that's all you were good for, get out of my face." The woman becomes dependent and whiny and demanding because this is all the culture has given her.
I wonder if this isn't a prejudice within ourselves, within women, that we've got to get over.
It is fearful for all of us to work with the old. One of the suggestions I make is to go to one of the nursing homes around you, the hospices, go find the old bag ladies. Try to help them to realize their force and their power. The danger in that for those who are much younger is facing the smells of old people, facing the fact they can't cut their toenails, that they can't see very well, that their hearing's poor, they're not pretty. They may be beautiful, but they're not pretty. They wear funny-looking clothes. They talk about things that you don't know anything about, and they talk interminably. Which I'm doing now. (Miriam protests.)
Hopefully, the next generation won't do this, because you all will have been constantly aware. And our crones will not be what they are. They won't have suffered years of neglect.
In an agricultural society, an old woman maintains her wisdom and therefore her value. But in an industrial society, she hasn't been good for much anyway, except to have babies and to be beautiful on some man's arm. So what good is she?
Of course, the hundreds of years of effort, on the part of the religious right, to destroy the power of women has focused on the old wise woman. I think our concept of aging has been very, very colored by the fact that for some thousands of years, not just two thousand but maybe five, we have been in the grips of a patriarchal society. In order to have power over somebody, you have to do away with their sources of power, in this case the power of the old wise woman.
M: You spoke earlier about the Matriarch. Explain that position between the Mother and the Crone.
E: I'm not the only one who has thought of this. I've been hearing women talk about the Warrior Woman as another face (of the Goddess). Within my concept, that is not a proper title. But several other people who I've talked to have used the term Matriarch.
The matriarch could be the CEO of a company. She could be the president of an organization. She could be the mother of many children who has raised her children and stands erect in her own power, no longer focusing her nurturing outward, perhaps focusing her nurturing within herself for her own education, and acknowledging her power and using her power in a strong and obvious fashion. She still has the physical abilities, and they've not begun to go away, and she is beginning to have the wisdom of the Crone. Maybe she's a proto-Crone.
M: Is the main difference between her and the Crone the physical aspect?
E: Except that the Crone is more deeply ensconced in the spiritual and she has more experience. I don't know that the two are separate, now that I think about it. This is all so fluid, as so many things are, in our learning.
The traditional face of the Crone is of the wise old woman who sits by the fire, and people come to her and ask questions or things, whereas I see the Matriarch as still being capable and interested in striding about and carrying knowledge out. She's ready to move to a much larger world than her own home, and so she could have a great deal of influence but still be quite capable of taking it outward.
This is not a finished definition. I'm struggling in my own perceptions to come to it. But I don't think that there's a place for looking at capable, middle-aged women.
M: Where do you see yourself in relationship to the Crone? You said you think of yourself as a matriarch.
E: I see myself as a matriarch. I don't think I am truly a crone yet, because I don't feel very wise most of the time. I have been put in that position by a lot of people who are very good to me, and I appreciate that. And I am struggling to achieve, but I see croneship as kind of a crown, and I'm not there yet. I have been named as crone by two or three groups of people. I appreciate it, and I consider it a challenge.
The other thing is that I'm not yet ready to stay at home by the fire, if that is an aspect of the Crone.
M: What would you say to women who are entering the crone phase of their lifetimes?
E: This is the time to devote to your own development, both physical and spiritual. I don't mean necessarily to go to a fat farm and lose weight or go to take milk baths or anything like that. Though it is a time to honor your own body, as it is assuming the form that is not honored. Take good care of it. It continues to be important that your body be honored as an integral part of your spirit. To begin to let yourself go slovenly, not to exercise and not to take care of your body is not to honor it. This another thing that middle-aged women do sometimes.
But the main thing is take time to honor yourself and your spirit. Train, learn and go within yourself to see what your own strengths are. As you grow older, your people are going to need your strengths. This may be book-learned knowledge, it may be personal experience, and it probably will be a combination of both.
But honor the self. Don't consider that your life is coming to an end because of getting older. Chronological age frequently has little to do with what's really happening to us. As we move on in years, I believe it's very important for us to honor each of those years. We must not feel that any one of them or any combination of them means the end.
It's just like throwing away things as you're moving on. Every time you move from one house to another, you get rid of stuff. Every time you move from one age to another, you get rid of stuff. But in so doing, you make room for new things. I believe that continuing to look at your life as new potential and new adventures is important. Don't regard new experiences as unworthy simply because they're new and say (in a deep voice:) "Well, in my day, girls didn't - " that kind of thing.
The crone may need more rest than she did. And she may need time to prepare her own self for transition. As we get older, we look at our graduation - because I see it as that - from one life to whatever comes next as an opening door. This is what the woman going into cronehood can spend some of her time learning, how to make that transition one of joy. Even if there is bewilderment, the crone can comfort.
As woman has always held the position of the civilizing force, she is still the guide. She is still the one who has the ability to make sense out of some of our confusion.
M: What would you say particularly to men about the Crone phase?
E: She does not lose her openness for love or sex. She doesn't lose her need for being loved and admired. We all have this need.
What she has to give to young men is a special understanding of their contemporaries. What she has to give to older men is the comfort of knowing that it doesn't all go away; a particular business failure doesn't mean you're no good as a person. What she has to give to old men is that you'll always have a companion.
M: You mentioned other workshops you do. Could you describe those?
E: As I said, I do a workshop called Evangelical Eco-spirituality. It is on the principle that, though we do not proselytize for our individual paths, it is high time we all hit the sawdust trail for the Goddess, for the Earth. We don't need to save the Earth; we need to make ourselves worthy. That's my biggest focus right now.
And then I do a number of trance workings. One thing the Goddess has given me at menopause is a voice that I seem to be able to use to help people into trance. Those I will be taping down to Orlando in January, and they will be available.
I call them trance journeys. They could be called guided meditations, except that you're in a deeper trance. Some of them are for knowledge, one particular one is a present-life progression for healing. And then I do the journey across the rainbow to meet other beings. So there are several.
And I have a new class called "Be Responsible for Your Mouth." A very useful class. It originally started out about gossip, but it has come to contain two classes. One is that our words are just as powerful a magick as our actions, so be responsible for what you say. And the other is of course that we can harm or we can help with our words. There's a Christian prayer that delights me. It says "Lord - we can say Lady - make my words sweet and nourishing, for tomorrow I may have to eat them." I would say that's a good thing to take into account.
And of course Nybor and I do a workshop together on creating your personal code of ethics. We are using Robin Wood's book currently as background. Robin Wood has written an excellent book on ethics, When - Where - If.
If you believe, as we do, that we are responsible for our actions - because that's what "An it harm none, do as you will" means, you are responsible - there's no Big Daddy and no Big Mama to come and rescue you. If so, everyone should have, perhaps written down but if not certainly clearly in their minds, their own personal code of ethics. The Wiccan Rede is useful, but it is not simple. We deal with situational ethics almost totally. We need to be able to have some plan for ourselves to deal with that. That's what our workshop is on, taking responsibility.
M: I know you and Nybor are both artists. Are you still active with your art?
E: Since my neck was broken in 1991, I have not done my soft sculpture any more. That neck-breaking was one of the gifts of the Goddess I would rather not have had. But it was to an extreme purpose in that it kept me immobilized for 12 weeks, in a hospital in Houston, Texas, and I had a lot of time to listen to Her, and She said, You're not to be doing this anymore. You are to build a community, you are to get the land, you are to find the people for the land. That is my main job.
In Haven homestead, there will be maybe 12 or 15 families that will live in a sustainable manner on the land. Many of the people in Haven will never live on the land. They will provide another layer. Haven has many layers of people and commitment and endeavors, but they're all attached to the land at the bottom.
M: Are you buying the land in your neighborhood?
E: We're looking at land farther south in West Virginia, where the farmland is open, on the western side of the mountains, with a bit more distance between metropolitan Washington, D.C., and Baltimore and us.
M: Describe the Haven a little more, if you will.
E: The Haven way is an eclectic eco-spiritual approach to a transformational life. It is less concerned with how to do ritual in our way, because people from many, many paths are part of Haven. It's about living in this world in a way that emphasizes our relationship not only to other humans but to all other beings in the world, the divinity of all of them, and equally honoring our bodies as well as our spirits.
We involve ourselves in the stewardship of everything around us and acknowledge that community is the strongest force we have for changing people. That community could be the group or the coven or the grove or whatever. We call it the Havenstead. We've had our first Havenstead formed, the Metropolitan Area Mid-Atlantic, and the initials spell MAMA. So very appropriate.
The Havensteads are an effort to have an ongoing active program, even though Nybor and I cannot be in any one place very often. It's to get people that are trained in the Haven way to gather a group of like-minded people around them so they will have a community, so that when there's a death, you have family; when there is a graduation, you have family. Or a wedding, or whatever. You have a community; you have people who know you and are intimately involved that your birthday will make a difference to, that the baby's new tooth will make a difference to. This is an effort to build community across a very desolate landscape, isolated in the nuclear family, which is the most stupid organization for a family I ever heard of. It gives you no support.
I feel like what we're doing, which is on the fringes of what everybody else is doing, is acknowledging and bringing into focus the interrelationship between humans and the other children of the Goddess.
M: Why do you feel your work is on the fringes of what other people are doing?
E: Because I see the traditional paths focusing more on their path, how we do things, how we work magick. And magick, of course, is available to all of us, no matter what your spiritual path is. My understanding, though I have never studied with any of the traditional paths, is that they focus on "This is our way of doing things." They do so rather than focusing on the interrelationship of our species with other living beings and our stewardship, and our need to honor our bodies and minds as well as our spirits.
M: So the Haven doesn't just include Wiccans or witches?
E: There are several people who are Taoist or Buddhist trained, but certainly we have many paths of pagans, who have come to us and who have been solitary. Most of our people originally were solitaries and did not want to join a group that gives them specific, stringent rules that might interfere with their private practice.
It is based on a lot of the Wiccan principles. The study on ethics, which is our first class, begins with "An it harm none, do as you will."
M: What's it like being a pagan in West Virginia? Do you get hassled by anybody?
E: Sometimes. We maintain a very low profile. We're already weird enough because Nybor is an artist.
We live in a little neighborhood where the houses were built for low-income people, and you get a certain level of education. One Halloween, we got up the next morning, and we found that all the tires on the van had been ice-picked, not slashed where you could repair them but ice-picked. One of our cats, my oldest cat, was killed, spread-eagled in the front yard. These were very sad things, very hurtful things, but since that one family moved away (we've had no problems).
We weren't able to find out for certain who did it. We reported it, and Nybor was very clear when he reported it to the sheriff's department. They said, "Why would anybody seek to harm you?" And he said, "Because we're not Christian."
We tried to establish an open pathway for dialog with the local police and the sheriff's department, and the highway patrol. They are aware of our beliefs, and we've gotten them all the material on the difference between Satanists and what we are. And I grow a lot of herbs and things, and I've been able to relate to the health food store here in town. For the college, Nybor periodically teaches classes, and he does a lot of free art for the library and for the local arts league, and for the city itself.
As I say, we are very quiet people. We don't have a lot to say about what we believe in, but then most people don't. Christians don't necessarily go around with a cross as big as a dinner plate and say, "I'm going to challenge you. I'm Christian, what are you?" Though they do proselytize. We have Jehovah's Witnesses who come around, and we welcome them and give them copies of "The Other People," the comic book that the Pathfinder Press put out. An excellent book. And we try to remain open to anybody's questions.
Pete Pathfinder says, "Let them know who you are, but first let them know valuable you are to them." We're trying to be valuable to the community. I help out at the senior citizens' center; we help with the food drive, as the Haven Community Church. Sometimes I hear from the children. I've been here 15 years, and the first children that were here then are already grown. I used to read to them summer evenings, and they called me Mother Goose.
Nowadays, two or three of them, very brave ones, come and say, "You know, they say you're a witch." And we talk about that. This one little girl said, "I told them I didn't care, you are my friend." And I said, "Well, I appreciate that."
M: Is there anything else that you want to talk about?
E: I wanted to say something about this whole business all over the country acknowledging that our sexuality is an integral part of our spirituality and acknowledging that there are many ways to love. The polyamory question, I guess that's the new word, has become a real bugaboo.
I think a statement should be made from the Crone that monogamy is not unpagan. Opening ourselves up to the experience of loving many, while it is much more difficult, interrelationships multiply. Those that are willing to give the time to it and let go of the ego, let go of the ownership, we will find that love multiplies, it does not subtract from.
But I see too many people, and especially when I'm on the West Coast, who are polyamorous, who somehow have purveyed the notion that if you're not polyamorous you're not a good pagan. It has nothing to do with it. Your relationships with people are your own, and should be that way, and should not be influenced by somebody else's ideas.
Depth of relationship is difficult to achieve with more than one person, but heaven knows empathy is hard enough anyway.
It has less to do with which bodies touch than it has to do with which spirits touch.
To reach Elspeth, write to Elspeth of Haven, 272 Spruce Drive, Keyser, WV, 26726, or call (304) 788-6440. Elspeth says: "I would prefer people to write, though I have an awfully hard time writing back. But they certainly can call, and I will call back collect. I'm on the road a lot, but I will try to stay in touch."
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