THOMAS, W. Va. – There are still a few warm breaths left to summer, time enough to tell a light summer’s story, even on a solemn day like this.

This one’s about two families, different in background, separated by age, divergent in outlook, and yet happy together in the last glows of this magnificent season.

One is a young family of people who had tried this and that but never really realized their dream, until now. The other is an old family of people who sold this and that and watched their dream die, only to be redeemed by the young couple. Their story is rooted in one building, here on East Avenue, abandoned only a few years ago, now teeming with life – a symbol of a community’s tired hopelessness only a decade ago, a symbol of a community’s reborn hope today.

That’s a big burden for one general store in a town of 432 people, but this was no ordinary general store. It was DePollo’s, and in the heyday of coal mining in the Potomac Highlands, it was choking with hardware, paint, beer, dry goods, groceries, and the hard-shell caps, carbide lights, and mining belts that were the crude accessories of the hard men who harvested the black coal of West Virginia. Everyone who stepped into the place remarked upon (and then, years later, never failed to remember) the ladder that moved on ball bearings across the perimeter of the store, the better to fetch a hunter’s cap on the top reaches of the wooden shelves hard by the pressed tin ceiling.

Sitting atop this mercantile empire – well, maybe not exactly an empire, but a community institution, well-patronized and well-loved – was Johnny DePollo, first-generation American, storyteller, town pillar (“upstanding,” in the words of Elizabeth Harper Dean, who grew up here). He was the leader, you might be inclined to say, of the informal lodge (membership not restricted but not exactly open, either) that met in the store every day to report who was saying what to whom, and who was doing what he shouldn’t be, and who was looking better than she ever had these days.

“This was a place you could do all the bull-ing you wanted,” Joe Belassone, 71, once the barber in town, said. Only when he said it, the verb had a certain nostalgic beauty to it.

Then things changed, as they often do, and not for the better, which is often the case. Thomas was a pretty bustling town, but it was planted in the Third World end of America, the part that supplied the raw materials so others could do the manufacturing. The coal mining jobs dried up, and so did the town. In the end (and by the end we are talking about the late 1980s), Johnny DePollo told his twin sons he kept the store open just to have a little something to do.

Thomas was being left for dead – “a dead horse,” as Joe DePollo, one of the sons, put it. The old tradition, where the twins would play their accordions to an assembly of townspeople gathered in the store on their father’s birthday, could not last forever. Johnny DePollo told the boys, who of course were no longer boys, to sell the store, invest the money, and take the earnings to keep their mother in the nursing home.

These stories end only one way, and in this one the end came quickly. Johnny DePollo died soon thereafter (his death, according to an account in the Charleston Gazette, “was a blow to the town”), followed swiftly by the death of his wife.

The store was gone and so were the prospects for Thomas, bleaker than a West Virginia winter. It was, mind you, never a particularly felicitous place to live, even in the money days; in 1928, a man froze to death putting chains on his tires. Nor was it a fancy place. Not genteel either. One history of Tucker County, a sober, forbidding volume (black-bound like most dutiful and dull works of this sort, not seasoned with even a trace of irony or warmth), notes simply: “Like most coal towns, in the old days, Thomas had its element that went for boozing, carousing and rowdyism. There was a generous supply of hash houses, bawdy houses, and saloons.”

Now to the happy ending, minus of course the bawdy houses. Three winters ago, John Bright and Kate Richards were on a ride, looking for nothing more momentous than a mug of coffee. They saw the store, and they saw the forlorn for-sale sign. They looked in the windows, and where others (let’s be honest: most of us) saw a deserted wreck of a building, coal dust on the floor, they saw a dream deferred. If you do not believe it, look at Kate’s journal for those years. She always yearned to preside over a community gathering place, warm with coffee, alive with music.

No need to delay the story or linger in the mystery. Today DePollo’s is known as the Purple Fiddle, a coffeehouse and mountain music mecca with a gonzo beer selection, fat sandwiches, homemade treats, and a music menu (old-time, which means fiddling, and bluegrass, which has a distinctive twang, and newgrass, which is produced with the tunes of bluegrass but the high energy of rock) that goes on weekend after weekend, no dark dates, ever. It’s the sort of place where the decorations are other people’s hats and where the owner will move the couch if someone wants to dance.

And last weekend, to mark the birthday of their father, Johnny DePollo’s twin boys, now 70, stood on the Purple Fiddle stage with their accordions and a couple of friends and belted out such standards as “In Heaven There Is No Beer,” “Please Release Me,” and a version of “Love” that might be recognized by the man who made the song famous, Nat King Cole, if he were in a forgiving mood. Every syllable was a grace note.

The twins, you see, were born in the apartment upstairs, the very apartment where Kate and John Bright’s little boy was born (no frantic trips to the maternity ward for Kate – and did I mention that there was no midwife present, only a friend?). And no one needs to point out how life has come full circle in the building that the twins’ grandfather bought 101 years ago and that was the original site of the birthday accordion celebrations. “We know our dad is watching from heaven,” said John DePollo, positively glowing as he talked between sets and Rolling Rocks, “and we know he’s happy.” Everyone is. A summer story, a happy one and one that recalls, on a day like this, the enduring values of America.