Home Sweet Home

As I prepared on Friday to head back to Kentucky for a short visit, I was reflecting on the meaning of home. I live in a city of transplants; now, as everyone grows older, some women I know are moving back “home,” often to care for an elderly mother. We are often the responsible ones even in situations where there are other relatives who live closer at hand. But is there something sweet and comforting in going “home” after many years?

Not for me. I’m bothered by the changes, the rabid growth, the erasure of old landmarks. The river city of my childhood was homely, the warehouses not yet converted into attractive restaurants and apartments, and there was no art district—but then I’ve never believed that art, which must be unruly, can be confined to a district or a state of mind. Nobody seemed aware of the Ohio River, but there was no throughway cutting it off.

It often seems to me that more people born in Kentucky stay there for the rest of their lives than is true in other states; in my birth family, third and fourth generations have often taken root there even when it seems other places offer more opportunities. What is it that draws them back permanently? What is it that draws me back for short visits?

Of course there’s a comfort in familiarity but there is also a dullness: the same faces, the same places, changing slightly over the years. Home may be where we never escape our earlier identities, where we are always somebody’s daughter, granddaughter, aunt or niece. And yet I’ve never really escaped the association; after thirty-three years here in Northern New Mexico, the longest time I’ve ever spent in one place, people still associate me with Kentucky. Yes, it’s partly my accent; but is it something else?

I hope it’s not the aura of gentility! A close friend told me Thursday evening that she didn’t invite me to a poetry reading that dealt with masturbation; she thought I’d be offended! I told her I would only have been offended if the male poet didn’t include female masturbation.

Now I’m going back—not “home”—for several reasons: primarily to enjoy and remotely supervise my Wolf Pen Mill Farm, 420 open acres that offer a breathing space in the remorseless sprawl of eastern Jefferson County. My son Will’s ashes are buried there next to the crumbling barn, and his two adult children live in Louisville surrounded by their mother and her family. This remarkable woman raised her son and daughter, alone, to love their wandering father. To this day, she calls Will a wonderful man.

I know I will be reminded, unfortunately, of my deep disappointment with the two not-for-profits I founded with such high hopes in the 1980’s. Maybe Kentucky is the wrong place to plant dreams, especially if they are the dreams of an ardent feminist.

But I’m also thanking my good fortune, and my parents’ wisdom, in sending me to college, at 17, in New England. It wasn’t a choice; it was a family tradition, fortunate in my case since I was too young to know what mattered—not the tradition, but my exposure to the life of the mind—and to the brutal New England winters.

Riding my bike to class—and we wore skirts then—in snow, hail, wind and rain, I was stimulated and challenged as I’d never been in the damp chilly Kentucky winters. And I had my first opportunity to learn how to ice skate in a class full of New England girls who’d grown up on frozen ponds. I only remember one winter in my childhood when a pond off River Road froze—and nobody had ice skates.

The class was challenging. I was the only beginner. Tottering on my skates, I was embarrassed, but I persevered. After months of struggle, I achieved a bit of mastery when I was finally able to skate backwards.

I keep these old white skates as a testimonial to the power of perseverance, and also to the great value of living in “foreign” places.

In Kentucky Radcliffe Harvard