By the time I was born, little remained of the coal mining industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Mid Valley region but skeletal breakers, ubiquitous culm banks, and the occasional rotten-egg smell of a still-active mine fire on the wind.

To some, this might sound ominous, or maybe even depressing, but for one particularly inquisitive child, who spent his days picking fossils and roaming the sparse Gray Birch copses dotting those same culm banks, it fostered a deep and personal connection with the Spirit of the place.

From the minute my bare feet left the linoleum and found themselves on grass and shale, I ran with it.  I breathed it in, and felt its hand against my cheek in the mystery of every breeze. It offered something that the chaos of a household riven by alcohol, poverty, and emotional instability could not – it offered a deep and unshakable sense of home.

As I write these words, I am sixty-two years old. Many years ago, I traded the culm banks and Company houses of a small Northeastern Pennsylvania borough for the stockade fences and manicured lawns of a suburban vinyl village in Southern New Jersey, only to discover within myself a deepening sense of spiritual homelessness.

Fingernail Moon: A Coalcracker Looks for Glassboro, the first lines of which were written just a little over two years ago on an unseasonably warm February evening, are the result of a year-long endeavor to establish contact with the Spirit of another place, to make myself available to its idiosyncrasies and its graces, and if it so desired, to share with it a few of my own…