A few days ago I spent time in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever visited, in order to be a featured writer at the annual Literary Feasts, which supports the Lexington Public Library.
Blog Posts on Kentucky
The Times They Are a-Changing
Sometimes, not too many times, I find myself complaining that things have stopped moving forward and even begun moving backwards after the heady transformations of customs and attitudes that changed my life in the 1970’s.
Seduction Alert
When I visit Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of the part of the state that would have sided with the Confederacy if President Lincoln hadn’t prevented it, I remember Stephen Foster’s “Old Sweet Song.” Is there anywhere else in the world that has such lush enormous maples, magnificent Tulip Poplars, hedges of spun sugar white flowers I can’t identify? Or such blocks of handsome turn of the century houses, as in Fayette Park, each with its distinctive Richardsonian bay window or Victorian white trim, each set at a comfortable distance from its neighbors in a broad pad of Bluegrass lawn and flower borders?
Do You Wear Shorts?
Five days ago I had an astonishing experience as I was waiting in line to get on an American Eagle regional jet in Louisville, Kentucky, flying to Chicago.
The Blue and White Bandana
“Look at the embroidery,” she said, spreading out the bandana. Dense, tiny silk flowers in red, gold, purple and blue covered every inch.
“On the other side, too.” She turned it over; miraculously, it seemed to me, the wrong side of the bandana was also completely covered with tiny flowers. I’d been sewing letters on a sampler, much against my will, and I knew how messy the back side of anything embroidered usually looked.
My Mother’s Eyes
When I became aware of her as my mother (I was her third child), she was a tiny blond woman, almost doll-like, formed by the conventions of upper class marriage. I almost never saw her without make-up, her hair set in careful blond curls, wearing a powerful girdle, a suit and carrying a purse; she seemed always to be armed for a distant battle.
Knife, Dagger, Poignard
It glittered obscurely in the back of the curio cabinet my grandmother kept in her dark little house in Richmond, Virginia, the house where she’d raised six daughters and a son. On the walls there were snapshots of all those golden-haired girls, and the one dark-haired boy, as well as their equally fair children and grandchildren, but I don’t remember them. Familiar icons, alike in all houses, they were not interesting; but the curio cabinet, and its contents-which only my grandmother touched-alerted me instantly to the electric presence of stories.
Growing Up Without Africa
It has taken me a long time to realize how little I knew about the women who raised me.
In The Heart of the Heart of the Country
My last reading—this month—in Kentucky was for another of what I call a dear audience, at the second floor library above the police station in the little outlying town of Prospect. Years ago this was a farming community; now, it has sprouted prosperous subdivisions, green with trees and grass, strip malls, gas stations—but also a small wildlife sanctuary, in easements, and residents who still remember the value of the land.
The Dearest Audience
Now and then I have the privilege of reading to an audience I can only describe as dear. That was the case with the group at the Jeffersonville Public Library this evening: twenty or so people who hung on every word of my story, “Selling The Farm,” as though the two sisters in the story were their own friends, or even their own sisters.