When I worked as a courier for the Frontier Nursing Service, we were told to sing as we rode in the mountains so the moonshiners would know we were girls and hold their fire.
Blog Posts on Kentucky
Tear ‘Em Down, Slats and All
It was a revelation to me when I was lured back to Kentucky and saw the reverence people there felt for old houses—and how hard they would work to preserve them.
The Bingham Estate: The Big House Reborn
As William Faulkner wrote in “Requiem For A Nun”, “The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.” But perhaps the past can, with will, imagination and love, be at least partly transformed.
Birth: The Kentucky Foundation for Women
Women artists are always in danger of extinction; already low on the pay scale, often with too many children and no support, they can hardly be expected to devote their limited time and energy to becoming proficient professional poets, painters, sculptors…
Wolf Pen Farm: Not A Bingham Estate!
Wolf Pen is the way many people in this country lived, when we were still agrarian and made do with much less, in the material sense, than we consider essential now. We lived in a few small rooms, we farmed, milled, carpentered, built, ran cattle or horses—managed to survive.
Rude Awakening
I… felt the midwives, and Mrs. Breckinridge, were just as foreign to me, possessed of some vision, some energy I’d never encountered before. I felt very small and very ignorant among them.
Women, Land and Missed Opportunities
Women in the United Sates now control 11.2 trillion dollars in investible wealth, 39 percent of the total. But are we wielding the decisions?
Ferguson On My Mind
It’s awkward, to say the least, for a privileged white woman like me to even attempt to touch the subject of racism; yet we are sometimes the women who knows its effects most intimately. Many of us were raised by a black woman and realized the limits put on their love for us when our mothers told them to stop kissing us and to add “Miss” to our first names. For me, that strange change marked my entrance into adolescence.
Bingham Estate, Louisville KY
I don’t usually call it the Bingham Estate but just the big house, which gives it the same moniker as SingSing; but when big news breaks, the big name seems appropriate.
Twin These Houses — The Blue Box
Both houses, uninhabitable due to size in both cases and dereliction in one, will continue as housing for myths, the myths that always throng around fortunes and obscure most of the facts about the fortune-makers lives.