"Tuckasee"

Well, today is Murray State's Homecoming, the first one Ben and I have missed since we graduated (which really isn't as impressive as it sounds since we still lived in Murray for a while...but we made it from Wisconsin and we made it down last year.) But I'm bummed out. Not so much because of overwhelming school spirit and dedication to my alma mater, but more because October is a great month in Kentucky. The weather is gorgeous, the air is crisp, the leaves are changing...it's just wonderful. In October, it is my niece's birthday and Ben's dad's birthday, and it's when Ben's "family" (they're not really related -- they were the family of Ben's late grandfathers sisters...yeah, I said sisters -- See, Ben's grandad's oldest sister married the Bradford guy who was the patriarch of the "non-family." Then she died and his grandad's younger sister married him! Very Old Testament. Anyway, they are lovely people who treat us all like we're their family...and if you go back to before the parentheses and skip this long explanation, I'll continue), the Bradfords, all get together at Kentucky Lake. It's good times. If you look at my photoblog, pretty much all the photos that say they're taken at Kentucky Lake were shot during the "Bradford Picnic," as we call it. Anyway, we try to make it down for those convergent events each year, and well...we're not there.

Of course, I would also like to be able to take the baby to meet her family. Somehow I hate it that she's never been to Kentucky. Will knows it's where he's from, and I think he always will. But I want Adelaide to feel like her roots are in "Tuckasee" (what we lovingly call that mottled Kentucky/Tennessee area that we and our families call home). Mostly the reason we couldn't go is because Ben had to use a lot of his time off when I was pregnant and of course after the baby came, and he doesn't have much left. I don't want to go without him, so here I am, blogging on Homecoming day.

Anyway, the sun shines bright on my Old Kentucky Home, and while I do love the bayou, the tumult here lately has left me longing for my home. Like the child who runs to his mother when he has been wounded, I want to run home to Kentucky. Louisiana is wounded. She is aching, growing, shedding a tight skin to become something new. I want the familiarity of long rolling hills filled with soybeans and tobacco. I want to eat fried catfish and hushpuppies. I want to take my baby and show her off. I want her to feel the Kentucky wind on her skin, to squint at the sun as it shimmers off the lake.

Thomas Wolfe said "You can never go home again." And he was right. Once you have really left "home," it is never home again. But the truth in that statement doesn't preclude joy in the journey back to where one is from. "Home" is not the same place it was when I was 16. But it wasn't the same place when I was 23. It was still home, though. Acceptance of the temporal nature of what we call home allows the comfort of home to be savored. If you don't expect it to give you something it can't, going home again is wonderful. When you realize that there will not be a "you"-sized hole waiting to be filled there, but that you are merely a familiar tourist temporarily touching what you love, it is like warm chicken soup on a cold, sniffly day. It can just be the elixer that you need. And I am sniffly here, in Louisiana, sick with the ache of feeling like I'm somewhere new all over again. Familiar Baton Rouge, where there is a "me" sized hole, is no longer familiar. Baton Rouge is learning to function again -- like someone healing after a broken leg, who will always have a limp, but can live happily once all is accepted and assimilated into reality.

But now the leg is healing. It is itching, and I need my chicken soup.