My Old Kentucky Home

For reasons not entirely clear to me, a friend of mine invited us to Kentucky for Thanksgiving with her family. Remy and I had been planning to go to Mammoth Cave again and do some more exploring than we were able to do the last time we went there (maybe a year?). The thought of saving money by sharing a car rental, getting to do a little spelunking AND eat a home-cooked nostalgic meal was more than enough to make us take her up on her offer.

My friend can't be summed up in a paragraph or two but, what is important to know about her is, she is single, in her mid-30's and has a similarly conflicted relationship with her family as I do. Normally, she and I respect the other's viewpoints and opinions and maintain a fairly jovial relationship wherein we can take pot-shots at the other, tease and jab all the while feeling comfortable that we regard one another as intelligent, worthwhile and likable women.

Anyone who has taken a road trip with a friend (a friend who is not one of those nearly-a-stranger friends that you may have worked with for 6 months or so and is not one of those we-should-have-come-from-the-same-womb best friends that you've known your entire life) can attest that time traveling together can change your relationship. I would like to add that meeting someone's family, after you've already gotten to know this individual as a being outside of where and with whom they were raised, can have similar relationship-altering powers.

Were someone to venture to my parents' home with me, they would come to understand why I am a willfully eccentric, rebellious-hair-having, foul-mouthed heathen. That someone would see me not only as the nomadic, free-spirited 30-year old of the right here and now but also see me as the five-year old desperate to please her puritanical mother and her alcoholic, womanizing, proselytizing father. The glimpse into that primordial person is more than many people are willing to share with anyone other than the person they intend to marry.

Despite the dog bite (we each brought our pups) before we'd even hit the road and the cramped conditions of our rental SUV, the trip was pretty typical until we reached the Kentucky state line: trail mix, sodas, frequent pee breaks, magazines and books on CD, heavy doses of Cher and Madonna and more than one hearty brick of a meal at a roadside stop that would otherwise be lethal to heart and waistline. Crossing into Kentucky, however, the air in the car changed. It was as though our companion was regressing back to the age at which she was first wounded by her kin. By the time we reached her mother's house in the far back woods of Western KY, she had been reduced to a reticent, sour and argumentative adolescent. Her family, despite our knowing many of their dirty little secrets before ever setting foot in their home(s), were welcoming and accommodating. Her mother fed us and immediately started showing us around the house, beaming at the presentation of her two gargantuan embroidery machines, which we complimented in kind. She and her second husband regaled us with stories of our friends' youth, of their own youth, and with side-splitting stories about in-laws and second cousins.

From her mothers', we went to the hospital to visit her grandmother. There we were introduced to the main characters, the aunts and uncles. We made small talk with complete strangers and skirted any mention of death, disease or disability until our respects were duly paid. We followed one aunt to her spacious double-wide in the middle of sprawling Kentucky hills and there we slept, showered, ate and watched copious amounts of television for nearly all of our trip.

Two highlights battle it out for prime mention in our journey, the first of which was the all-family Thanksgiving dinner on Friday evening. Thirty-odd members of the clan piled into a country church's fellowship hall to eat together, to laugh and argue and, most of all, to be one. We were welcomed by each and every one of them and even given first pass at the magnificent buffet. The desserts were a pancreatic nightmare, filled with sugar and creams and chocolate beyond imagination and Remy and I both were in the most pleasant kind of gastric pain for hours following the meal.

Sitting back as the outsider that evening, I couldn't help but wonder that families are funny beasts. Without fail, they are filled with characters, are a source of simultaneous shame and pride, bring comfort and pain in the exact same gestures and have a way of shaping an individual in ways too subtle and complex to comprehend. I am every single grand parent, sibling, cousin and aunt and, because of the marks and impressions--both real and figurative--that they have left on my being, I am unique in this world. I am amazed at how such a common experience, the universality of being shaped by others in our upbringing, can birth such diversity and isolation. I saw that night, as the swirling mass of relatives churned around me, the most honest parts of my friend and, as unpleasant as the trip could be, it was enlightening to be privy to the most intimate development of another human being.

Likewise, the second most noteworthy part of the trip, our visit to Mammoth Cave, drummed up comparable awe in me. At that one moment in time, I was standing in the midst of a river of change, filling one cavernous underground space while it was in the middle of its development, its nascence, its adolescence, its menopause. Were I to stand in that spot long enough, stretch my life out beyond the eons, I could see and understand it all. One day, that spot where I was standing would be filled with rock or flooded by water and it would never again exist for anyone at any other moment in time the way that it was for me right then.

I couldn't help but cherish the frozen moments of being that we held, as we flew through rolling, yellowing hills and past craggy, precarious cliffs. A half dozen pigs that we had seen the day before, nearly evenly spaced along the Western Kentucky Parkway, were gone not even 24 hours later. Those bloody and abandoned creatures were ours, those sights and moments never to be repeated. Just as the five hours we spent eating beside the multitudinous kin of a friend has left its tool marks in our clay, shaped yet again by family that, though not our own, had the sculptor's touch.