I don’t know if Betty Longo had a good life, although I suspect she did. Don’t know much other than that she was born in Bob Town, Pa., up the hill where the gray clapboard houses were built in rows for workers.  She moved with her husband to Greensboro, down by the Monongahela River, in 1953. They bought a narrow lunch-counter store on the main street, a block from the old movie theater, with candy and ice cream sodas and sundaes for sale and dry goods ranging from greeting cards to douche.  Some evenings after the Greensboro movie house had closed, they’d get in the car and honk their horn down at the ferry landing and the boat would come across from the New Geneva side and carry them across for 25 cents so they could catch a movie in Uniontown.

They lived on the second floor over the store, and her husband worked at the mine. She loved him, there is no doubt. Somewhere in our conversation I knew he was dead, but if any man lives, in vivid memory, and is still loved, it’s Betty’s husband.

He made a coat rack with brass fittings attached to a walnut pole, all parts scavenged from the mine. She pushed the winter coats aside and showed us the coat tree’s base, also scavenged from the mine. “See, he made such wonderful things,” she said, her 80-year-old eyes sparkling, so proud- to this day, several years since he died, so proud of her companion from Bob Town.  

There’s a photo on the wall he took with a Nikon: The road to Point Marion, a few miles up river, one morning when the frost had coated the trees in ephemeral silver, a photograph so well composed and framed and yielding such beauty – the sun on the frost maybe an hour before it all disappeared – a moment on the wall, well loved by Betty Longo.

It’s been so magical.  I told people I was going to paddle to Pittsburgh from Fairmont on the Monongahela and that I want to meet people along the river, and already I’ve met Betty in Greensboro, who hopes she’ll live long enough to see a history of Greensboro she’s working on published.  Was my trip down the river "invented" so that I could capture something of this fleeting life, a life of a woman who shows me the light fixture on the ceiling of her living room over the store, now rented out to medical students, and explains that she chipped the paint off of it to reveal the old metal underneath?

“I love it!” she says.

And  the  trees across the street: “I just love them,” waving her hand across the scene to take in every tree, the April bloomers painted pink and white and all the other, lesser trees, just for being there, near her home on the Monongahela river.

Betty is a woman in love. I don’t know how she does it. I was jaded and dejected at 40. She’s twice that age, white-haired, all of 4 foot 11 inches, flailing hands and arms like the conductor of an orchestra, ebullient, joyful, in love with it all.

In the store (the same one she’s run since the 1950s –so well-preserved, or unchanged, that it’s retro) there’s a wooden counter where residents of Greensboro come to pay their utility bills.  Betty is treasurer of the local water and sewerage system that was put in with seed money from the Corps of Engineers when the Corps raised the river level 15 feet for the new dam downriver at Grays Landing. The river rose over the old raw sewage outflows into the river. Betty ended up being the treasurer of the system. 

Anyway, before the Corps broke in: The wood of the counter where residents come in to pay is worn with groves along the grain from all the fees shoved across it during her years as collector. “A fellow told me I should put Formica on the counter here where it’s worn, and I said ‘no, I won’t do that’ because all these groves are memories of the people who have come in here.” 

Betty loves the wood and the worn places and the memories of her life.

Betty in the store

J. J. Longo Store in Greensboro

Betty looks over a draft of a history of Greensboro.

Betty runs her hand over the wood at the utility bill window.