Listen Here by Sandra L. Ballard

receding memory,” as she is “one of the people whose life I used to write about as a small town journalist.” Belinda carefully describes to these medical students that having AIDS gives one both “devastation and exhilaration in equal measure.” Devastation at the “wreckage of a simple and satisfying life with my family, exhilaration at finding myself alive at all.” With springtime coming, her children healthy and playing, the family safe, she says, “The grace of it all sustains me.”
    As I remove the tape I think of Belinda's words during a recent telephone conversation. She talked about the irony of “the terrible beauty of AIDS. I have new eyes. I can see things different. Life is precious and rich. It's a tremendous gift.”
    Then I think of this powerful little woman, her green eyes and childlike hands, and of her contribution to people with AIDS and especially to people without AIDS. Her plays and short stories have opened Appalachia to us, to the charm of our culture and a deeper way of viewing life. Her writing shows us who we are and from whom we came, and that as common people we are okay. She encourages us to live a passionate, caring life, to make the most of every moment, and to nurture a healthy sense of humor.
    Belinda, a flower of life, is our tremendous gift. She lives one of her favorite Native American sayings, “The quality of life is not measured by length but by the fullness with which we enter into each present moment.”
    Note: For more on Belinda Ann Mason, see the biographical note and sample of her work on pp. 386–90.

F RANCES C OURTENAY B AYLOR
    (January 20, 1848–October 19, 1920)

    Frances Courtenay Baylor was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the daughter of Sophie Baylor Dawson, from Winchester, Virginia, and army officer James Dawson.
    Educated by her mother, Baylor spent most of her childhood on army posts. She lived in San Antonio and New Orleans. Around 1865, when her father died (or left), her mother resumed using her maiden name and returned with Frances to live with family in Virginia. At the end of the Civil War, they traveled to England with Frances's sister, who had married Confederate general J.G. Walker, and lived there for several years before returning to Winchester, Virginia.
    Baylor drew on her travel experiences for a number of newspaper sketches that appeared in papers from London to New Orleans under the name of a male relative. Her first success was a novel, On Both Sides , in which she combined two popular sketches she had written for Lippincott's Magazine —the first focused on the social life and adventures of an American family in England and provided the counterpoint for a corresponding tale of an English family in America. “Miss Baylor” (as she signed her work) also became well known for her patriotic poetry. Though her poetry has not been collected, her collected stories were published in A Shocking Example, and Other Sketches.
    Of her many novels written for children, Juan and Juanita , focusing on the capture and escape of two Mexican children, received widest acclaim. At the heart of many of her books are characters who struggle with clashing cultures.
    Baylor's second novel, Behind the Blue Ridge: A Homely Narrative , focuses on mountain people of Virginia and follows in the local color tradition of Mary Noailles Murfree, recording the dialect and regional customs of people Baylor observed.
    In 1896, she married George Sherman Barnum. She was widowed by 1900 and returned to her mother's home in Winchester, where she spent the remainder of her life.
    In this excerpt from Behind the Blue Ridge , John Shore, who has never been a devout churchgoer, “married the prettiest girl on the mountain” and briefly becomes a church member.
O THER S OURCES TO E XPLORE
P RIMARY
    Novels: A Georgian Bungalow (1900), The Ladder of Fortune (1899), Miss Nina Barrow (1897), Claudia Hyde (1894), Juan and