"Mountain Mama provides lakes and streams that yield water for drinking and home use, as well as hydroelectric power to light the lights and run the industries. Her waters invite her family to swim, fish, and go boating in hundreds of locations. She makes education available through every kind of school you can think of, from K-12 to colleges and universities- forty-seven of them. Her maternal instinct spoils us with the gorgeous green of summer, the dazzling colors of autumn, and the fresh pastels of spring, but disciplines us with occasional hard winter storms that snow us in and remind us how vulnerable we are. She indulges us with dozens of parks and campgrounds, outdoor festivals of you-name-it, and my goodness, gracious, don't forget the ramp feeds. Last but best, the "mountain" part of her name, rises up out of the deep valleys "with summits bathed in glory like the Prince Emmanuel's land" as the old song puts it. When I stand with others at the foot of the hills in the shadows of an evening and look up at the peaks and pinnacles or hike the summits and gaze out some early morning at the layers of drifting fog caressing the slopes, that is when Mountain Mama really shows her stuff. "Take me home, country roads.""