Patricia Yarberry Allen, M.D. is a Gynecologist, Director of the New York Menopause Center, Clinical Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Weill Cornell Medical College, and Assistant Attending Obstetrician and Gynecologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She is a board certified fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Allen is also a member of the Faculty Advisory Board and the Women’s Health Director of The Weill Cornell Community Clinic (WCCC). Dr. Allen was the recipient of the 2014 American Medical Women’s Association Presidential Award.

Second of a series by WVFC publisher Patricia Yarberry Allen, as she chronicles a singular Thanksgiving.

It is 9 a.m.and we are in a snow storm.  Snow is covering the fields and the wind is increasing in intensity.  Anorexic pine trees line the sides of the road, barely rooted in shallow soil they hold fast to each other to keep from being blown away. White wigged and puffy Christmas trees are waiting for Saks to steal them for their windows.   Skeleton trees on tops of the mountain almost out of view are waving their white arms to us.

Our journey has taken us through the West Virginia Mountains on a super highway carved out of the stone with vistas that take my breath away.  I wonder which artist created these gray ribbons of roads that curve around boulders and float over streams.

The curators of our big city museums should come to West Virginia and bring back parts of this beauty for those urban prisoners who can’t get away long enough to visit these environmental masterpieces in their natural habitat. Curate a vista of snow and pale gray light that covers the sky and the farscape, curate the monumental boulders and the sense of space that is unending.

Now that would be a blockbuster for those who live in urban small spaces, who live with today’s fears that the walls are really closing in.