Appalachian Mountain Girl

As a young girl, Rhoda began to catch glimpses of the world outside her narrow mountain community through the stories in True Confessions magazine and the pictures in the Montgomery Ward catalog—which to her seemed like "visions of a fairy world." When Rhoda married and moved to a small town in New York State, it seemed that her dreams of a better life had been realized. Yet scenes of Letcher always "hovered in the back roads of her memory." When she revisited her homeland, this time as a New Yorker, Rhoda found that Letcher was no longer the place of her memories.