My mother moved me away from the WV/KY area when I was 4 years old to Orlando Fl. which has turned out to be a pretty big place. We always went back to visit once a year during spring break up until I married in 1977. I can remember comming home from our vacation and would giggle as I told my friends about my grandparents,aunts and uncles homes and land. Such as I remember being a little girl and if I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I was not allowed to walk to the outhouse, instead I had to pee in the pee can (coffee can) Pappaw always said a bear would come out of the mountains and eat me up if I went out after dark! I remember that in order for me to take a bath it had to be a sponge bath because my grandparents had no inside bathroom. I remember my grandmother washing her clothes in a washing machine that had rollers on top, the clothes had to go through those 2 brown wooden bars. I remember wires hanging from her kitchen ceiling that they used for the lighting. I remember comming home from my vacations and my friends teasing me because I had picked up the talk and they would tell me that I was talking like a hillbilly. I remember my uncles comming home from work black from the coal and my aunts would all have an outside shower set up because they werent allowed in the house til they washed the coal off. These things are all funny and fasinating to me however never in a million years had I thought that it would be an insult to be called a hillbilly. I work in the tourisim industry and meet people from all over the world everyday, and I tell them all that I am an adopted Floridian, however I am really a hillbilly. And I say it with pride, as that is how I have always looked at it. My family from E.KY and Wva did not have thier home this way because they were poor, as a matter of fact they were always better off than we were, even though we had modern things much faster. Instead it seemed to me, from the eyes of a child that they choose to stay with this way longer because they werent intrested in changing the way they lived just because someone else did. Sherry