06/09/2026
Ok, folks ... I just sent in my entry ... Wish me luck?! 🍀
Well, I'll tell y'all right now ... I ain't never been any kinda beauty queen. I don't have a talent for baton twirlin' ... I've got one leg shorter than other so my titanium legs won't allow me to break dance but I can move like black strap molasses struck by lightnin' ... and I cain't sing like I'm a member of the Heavenly choir.
But what I do have is a story that'll make you laugh, make ya cry, and maybe ... just maybe ... make ya look at your own life a little different.
Ten years back, I was sittin' in a wheelchair while doctors told me I'd never walk again. I heard 'em. I just didn't believe 'em. Before that, I spent seventeen years in the grip of addiction ... seventeen years of my life that I clawed my way back from ... one hard, sacred, ugly, yet oh so beautiful day at a time. I've been clean seven years now. Seven years of wakin' up ever' mornin' in a life I actually built, and I ain't done bein' grateful for it yet. I lost two sisters to cancer, so I made the decision to have a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy. Complications durin' reconstruction left me with one breast. I got one. It's mine. I'm here. And I'm woman! And I'm also, ironically, befriendin' my own diagnosis of a rare blood cancer.
Now I ain't tellin' you'ns any of this for sympathy ... I'm tellin' ya 'cause I need you to understand that I know what it feels like to be at the bottom of somethin' that feels like it has no floor ... and I know what it feels like to find it anyway, push off, and rise.
I rewrote my whole life. Not just the hard parts ... ALL of it. I built something from the wreckage that I am genuinely, deeply proud of ... a healin'/wellness practice ... a Divine purpose and firey passion for a way of movin' through this world that is rooted in joy, simplicity, authenticity and the kind of fulfillment and gratitude that don't require you to run yaself into the ground to earn it. And all I wanna do now ... truly, that's it ... is share the love and freedom that I found on the other side of all that. That's my whole mission. That's the whole thing.
Which brings me to Hinton ...
Lord have mercy, y'all. These people. This land. That river. I have never in my life encountered a community so full of warmth and grit and genuine, bone-deep hospitality. You walk into a room in Hinton and somebody already knows ya name or wants to.
And that is ever'thing to a WV girl that's been ever'where else.
These mountains ... and her people ... are pure magic.
But I see somethin' else too, and I'ma say this with all the love that I am ... I see the weight. I see it in the set of folks's shoulders and the wrinkle in their brow. I see it in the way folks talk about rest and ease like it's somethin' they gotta 'earn' before they're allowed to have it.
I see generations of hardened, weathered folk who survived the most difficult things they've never talked about ... and somewhere along the way the survival became the whole story. The belief that you work fingers to the bone until the day you die ... that struggle is just the nature of things ... that ease is for somebody else ... and that ain't truth, y'all.
It ain't.
I desire to bring something to this li'l river town ... The Soft Spot. Literally. I am workin' to establish a wellness boutique right down by that river, a place where folks can come and put the weight down for a little while ... take a deep breathe and finally feel safe to exhale ... where healin' ain't clinical and cold but warm and earthy ... and community connection is too ... and feels like somethin' your mommaw woulda known (and talked about from her rocker on the porch) had she'd had the time and the permission and her God given authority to tend to herself.
So why am I runnin' for Miss Possum?
Because a possum ... bless its heart ... is one of the most misunderstood creatures in the animal kingdom. Ever'body thinks it's scraggly and weird and kinda rough around the edges. But that creature has survived since the time of the dinosaurs. It plays dead when life gets too hard ... then gets back up and keeps movin'. I prefer to think the 'playin' dead' is it knowin' when somethin' is out of it's control ... so it just surrenders, and allows it to pass. It ain't pretty by conventional standards but it is resilient in a way that puts most creatures to shame.
I feel a real kinship with the possum ... is what I'm sayin'.
Crown me or don't ... I'm gonna be here either way, down by the river, rootin' for ever' single one of you'ns. But if you want a Miss Possum who's lived a little, loved hard, became somethin' ever'body said she couldn't, and genuinely believes this community deserves more joy and laughter and light than it's been told it's allowed to have ...
well, honey. I'm your gal. 🐾
