Leonora was a beekeeper maven and a bold accomplished folklorist who studied women’s fabrics, especially hand-made quilts and all the domestic stories they told, making many friends of old women outside the world’s ken but holding vast riches of character.

Leonora must have asked some of the many who admired him who can I trust with this? And several gave him my name as I can be trusted and lead with my heart even in matters of business… especially in those matters. 

Leonora used a variety of pronouns to describe themselves and I tried to follow, but they gave me an old-man-pass and never burdened me, though their friends who were many still argue about what they demanded to be called.

We talked for hours on the phone but never met, their soft West Virginia cadences familiar to my mountain past, both accents shouldered aside for access to a greater world both deepening into twilight as we talked about our pasts about their health, their dilemma, future, the house, the family in West Virginia who still treated them with a deep and troubling affection. They talked with their mother every day.

Leonora and I continued our conversation until the end: who to deliver the 19c spinning wheel to, the disposition of the house and tools, how to conduct a clothing giveaway for all his lovers and friends. For he had good style and closets full of leather, cotton, wool, and silk, mostly vintage and well-chosen clean and pressed like applicants to a deep-South debutante affair but more punk. Definitely more punk.

On a Sunday afternoon I made a simple dinner by myself while we recited everything we treasured which was much, and we ended the conversation with declarations of affection and gratitude in rich hillbilly accents only our mothers would recognize. Leonora died the next day to much consternation and surprise, to wailing and rash opinions. The obituary was slight and inadequate, with only one pronoun.