The home I’ll always have
I missed the Kentucky state line during last week’s drive.
“Are we in Kentucky yet?” Michael asked, and I saw the 2-mile marker. The counting had started at the state line, so we were back in the Bluegrass state.
Normally I notice — I say, “Welcome to Kentucky!” to whomever is in the car with me, and I try to take a picture of the sign as it zooms by. I love to travel, but I love to be back home in Kentucky, too — which, as of today, has been a state for 229 years.
The longest I’ve ever been away from Kentucky is just over two months, when I interned at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Florida. I feel at home there, too (which I wrote about last week), but I was excited as I crossed the state line and took a blurry picture.
While at the beach last week and through the long weekend back in Kentucky, I read Silas House’s Appalachian Trilogy, about several generations of a family in Eastern Kentucky. In The Coal Tattoo, after several months living in Nashville, Anneth can’t resist the call of Kentucky to come home. As she crosses the state line, on a long bus ride, she says aloud, “I’m home, by God.” That’s how I always feel, too.
When I returned to Kentucky last week, and after my internship, I went first to my childhood home in Bowling Green. Our family moved in as a family of four in March 2003 (then we filled up the house with two more siblings). I do have memories of the first home I lived in (I can picture the layout, mostly, and I remember hiding in my parents’ closet during a game of hide and seek), but the home my parents have lived in for 18 years now has been my main and longest home.
During college, it felt like a halfway house — it was still home, but most of my stuff and most of my time was spent in dorm rooms and apartments in Lexington. In March 2020, just a few months before I expected to graduate college and make a more permanent move, I moved back to my parents’ house to quarantine.
For the next four months, because of quarantine, I did nearly everything there: finished school, graduated college, ate takeout and my mom’s chocolate chip pancakes, read books, laid by the pool with my mom and sisters, organized childhood trophies and assignments and photo albums, worked part-time, started my full-time job, and more.
It was weird, and felt a little like a step backwards. But I quickly learned to appreciate another summer at home with my family, something I will likely never have again. I worked at the dining room table that is somehow exactly the right height (and remains stable despite the time my youngest sister broke it while using it for ping pong). I got on the trampoline to recreate a decade-old picture of me and my siblings. I walked a 5K through our neighborhood with my family, including our dog Bluegrass. I swung in the swing on the back porch that belonged to my great-grandfather. We took pictures in the same spots in the house where we’ve documented every Halloween, Valentine’s Day Father-Daughter Day, and first day of school.
I spent one night at my parents’ house this weekend, between vacation in Florida and getting back to my cats in my apartment in Lexington. On the morning that I left, my dad walked out to my car with me. I had asked him to get the oil changed while I was in Florida, which he did, plus he had cleaned it out. Just before I started to back out the driveway, my mom ran out in her pajamas to give me the rest of a blueberry donut from GADS, Bowling Green’s best donut shop.
Then they watched (from the garage that I once backed into, just after I got my license) as I drove away.
