Authentic. Day 2. The Setting

IF YOU MISSED DAY ONE’S ENTRY CLICK HERE

This narrative begins somewhere in the early 90s. Steel Magnolias still felt fresh, Julia Roberts was still on her way up. The Royal Crown logos hadn’t yet started to fade down on the horse show concession stand. The local elementary school still stood tall and proud on the hill in the back side of town. The sidewalks had long been crumbling and forgotten, but the town still had a mom and pop shop or two. 

There is a farm, a very old farm. One that has been around longer than Kentucky has been a state that sits in a bowl shaped valley. The tiny Waltons Creek flows quietly through this plot of land. The creek, named after the surveyor who first surveyed these parts after the Revolution, became the name of the community that settled along its banks and in this family. A family traveled from the mountainous parts of Virginia, down through the Cumberland Gap, and settled here on this farm in western Kentucky. The farm was originally a two thousand acre square plot. Large stones marked its boundaries. Over the decades and centuries to come the plot would be divided as the generations came and went. Parts would be sold off, parts would be stripped of its land and minerals as the coal industry too came and went, Finally in the 1990s, where this story begins, only a few hundred acres remained. What started as a sugar cane plantation of sorts had become various plots, many totally baron and faded with time.

There in the middle sat a little white baptist church, a cemetery, and the remains of a one room school. The county highway cut clear through the middle of the original farm. The church sat over to the right on a hill. Down on the left the last remaining farm sat. A row of houses dotted the little one lane chip-and-seal road. A wooden bridge takes the little road down into the woods, a woods that feels like a Currier and Ives snow covered landscape in the winter months. The entire place felt like one of those scenes from Little House on the Prairie. It was a place that you knew the roots ran deep into the hard clay soil. Relics of the past filled the barns, an old abandoned car was helplessly rusting and half buried on the bank, a few forgotten foundations of forgotten stories and forgotten homes got lost in the woods, and the garden was filled with broken pottery and artifacts of a cabin that burned one tragic night. The place and the stories often times doesn’t feel, I reckon that’s why I am writing this. In the summer the fields were filled with endless rows of corn or seas of beans. The winters, the season that wasn’t particularly long left the fields barren and at a young age they seemed like vast blank lands between those three houses and the other houses and farmsteads that filled that valley’s land.

This story takes place there, in those three houses, along that straight stretch of road, and along the banks of the tiny Waltons Creek. 

Authentic. Day 1. An Introduction

We all have stories to share, we all have pasts that are woven into our histories like tapestries, some threads of flax, some of cotton, some of silks and gold. We all have stories we’d rather not share, stories we’d rather not relive ourselves, and of course volumes of stories we’d love to share with the world. The truth is our lives are a collection of these stories. Our lives are a massive anthology of tales, adventures, tragedies, and triumphs. With each passing chapter and volume we get to determine where we go next, and in those moments where we feel helpless and hopeless we get to pray to the gods and the universe that we receive the divine energy to know where to go or where to stay. 

The greatest power in all of this is our own personal ability to take the pen or the type writer or the laptop for ourselves and to remember that we have agency in our own lives. We have the ability to share our stories and our pasts to find strength for ourselves or to find strength for others. We get to work through the traumas of the past by being intentional with the words we use and the narrative that we share. For me that is oftentimes knowing when to stay quiet, when to allow the memories and the stories to simmer, and when to finally put the pen and paper and words together. For me I have learned that one of my greatest talents in life is story telling and writing. I have learned that I have a way with words that is comforting to myself and to others. Words that are often times wise, ripened like watermelons in the hot southern summer sun, baked on the hardened earth, sweetened from the cool morning dew, and made strong by those endless hours of humidity and bright cloudless light. I learned long ago that I have an affinity for a slower way of life, today we call it Slow Living, as a child it was just the way we lived. Somewhere along the way between that rural Kentucky plot of land and this chapter sitting at a faux marble desk in New York City I learned a few things about life, about history, about small towns, gossip, community, and the proper way to make sweet tea…

Before we go back to the 1990’s rural Americana landscapes it is important to first acknowledge that for the past few years I have felt voiceless, silenced by life and silenced by narratives and lessons I didn’t get to control. Those chapters left me feeling silent as I slowly rebuilt my confidence and my love of life. Over the past couple of years I have slowly felt myself returning, my confidence, my drive, my talents, and my strengths coming back to the surface, and my ability to speak for myself once again flowing through my veins like the Rough River flows down from the hollers and hills and on towards the Green River bottoms land. Today I set here feeling strong again and feeling like it is a time to share, a time to unfold the heirloom quilts that have been sewn from the threads of life and to air it for the coming spring.