Roots, Loss, and Coming Home
I was born in 1958 in a small West Virginia town, the seventh of twelve children — four girls and eight boys. There were three boys and three girls older than me, and I came into the world in the front bedroom of the very land I live on now. Dogwood Meadows isn’t just where I ended up. It’s where I began.
When I was four, my family moved to Florida, where my mom’s people lived. I spent most of my childhood there, but West Virginia has a way of calling you home whether you understand it or not. I returned in the spring of my fourteenth year and stayed long enough to graduate high school in 1976, the bicentennial year.
I tried one year of college before realizing it wasn’t the path for me, and at twenty years old I joined the Navy. I served six years, went through Hospital Corpsman School and then X-ray School, and learned more about people, discipline, and hard work than I ever expected.
In 1983 I met Donnie — the man who would become my partner for the next three decades. We moved in together and married in 1984 after my discharge. In 1999, we moved back to West Virginia, and in 2004 we bought a house together. Life settled into something steady and good.
In 2017, everything changed. Donnie passed away, and the world I had built with him cracked wide open. I let the house go and moved off-grid that same year. I came back to the land where I was born — Dogwood Meadows — and I’ve lived here ever since.
This place is quiet and honest. It asks for work but gives peace in return. I live here with my dogs, my solitude, and the memory of the man who helped shape my life. The Queer Hermit isn’t a persona. It’s simply who I became when the world got quiet enough for me to hear my own voice again.
If you’re reading this, welcome. This is my story so far, written in the same plain, steady way I live it.