Kelly At Large #132 Kentucky Edition
In which I travel 21 hours one way to spend two days hugging kin, stuffing my face, and sneezing with delight.
So I did it. I left my Paris apartment Friday June 2 at 7 a.m., traveled all the way to Kentucky, and was back on my couch by Tuesday, 11 a.m.
Insane as the whole trip was, I’d probably do it again. Even if Day One meant taking one subway, two suburban trains, a shuttle train thing, and a transatlantic plane just to get to New York’s JFK airport. From there it was a shuttle bus to a subway, after which I paused for some really good tacos al pastor from a truck at the Roosevelt Avenue Jackson Heights stop where I took another shuttle bus to LaGuardia so I could catch a plane to Louisville, where a friend picked me up in her car at 4 a.m. Paris time, 10 pm EST.
That was 21 hours en route. I felt like I was 19 years old again and remembered the time I took a Greyhound bus from Kentucky all the way to Texas, washing my hair in a bus station in New Orleans because my god, something gross happens to hair after several hours smushed against a vinyl seat.
We talked for something like three hours that night, then collapsed in beds which we left only a few hours later to host two different shifts of sisters and multiple kids which ranged from three or four to twenty-something. That’s why I was there. I’d been planning a trip to see my father in the Fall, but he died without much warning. Tempus fugit and all that. So when you have a few days just get out your credit card, hop on the fucking plane, and give everybody a hug before it’s too late.
Another friend picked me up afterwards so I could spend the night and next morning at her place, before heading to New York where I crashed a few hours to break up the brutal trip and get a face full of soup dumplings. Then it was home again.
It’s hard to write about Kentucky. I worry sometimes about reproducing the very stereotypes I hate, just because my family sometimes is guilty of them. And my Southern Baptist mom did banish me from her life for a very formative decade.
But you should know that in my whole trip there, we all wore shoes, (mostly) though none of my friends or family flourished a gun or talked about God or Jesus or sin. The mega church my sister used to go to was nothing more than a convenient landmark to explain where one friend lived. And my niece who had campaigned against Gays in the Military is grown up now and came along with her boyfriend and was far more interested in movie trivia than my boring proclivities. Her mother didn’t mention going to church anymore. Maybe she doesn’t. I didn’t ask, she didn’t tell. Though I did learn she voted for Obama at least once.
And before and in between my family visits, my friends fed and watered me. Oh my God, with the odd drop of Wild Turkey, and good Kentucky ham from a fancy deli where they cure it themselves, and soup beans and vinegary greens, Benedictine which my mother would make sometimes for the ladies-only luncheons she loved. There was a run, too, for Memphis-style hot chicken and waffles which were gobbled up on a porch. A porch! And homemade soup with fresh corn. And I learned to eat watermelon with cinnamon of all things which makes it taste oddly creamy. (Seriously. Do this.)
There were short walks, too, through suburbs and parks where I exclaimed as I always do, “Oh my god, it smells so good. I’ve missed that.” The perfumes of the earth and wickedly blooming vegetation yank me back to childhood when we would climb trees and wade in drainage ditches and creeks and sometimes hop in the car and go hike in a nearby forest.
And every time I’m there I always wish the place were closer, and every time I leave I ask myself why I don’t go more often. Though of course I know.
That’s it for this time.
If you think of it, why not heart or share or say hello or something?
Disgruntedly yours,
xoxo K
Sometimes, it's the best parts of home you recapture, and that's a very human blessing.