I was fresh out of high school, an only child, with a decision to make. My father had just graduated the past summer with his PhD and had accepted a new position in a different state. I’d spent my first four years of life in Texas, my next 13 in Southern Illinois in a college town that breathed in and out with the school schedule. It was all I’d ever known. Do I stay in Illinois and go to school there, the comfort zone choice, or do I leave my friends, my familiar streets, my favorite ice cream place, movie theater…….and go with my parents? The thing is, as an only child, friends and places become family. It’s the tree on which I had grown and gave me balance and structure. I chose to go to Kentucky.
We landed in our new home, the first brand new one my parents had ever owned, in January just a week away from a blizzard that kept us homebound, unpacking and settling in for the first two weeks, not knowing anyone but the people my father had interviewed with. The snow and ice on the ground emphasized the sudden silence of life, cocooned in a new place with no one to call friend yet. Everything slowed to a stop and stopped to slowness. It was unnerving and exhilarating all at once. It felt like we’d moved to Alaska. We were the last house at the end of a cul de sac, the only other houses farther up the street. The only outside sound or movement was the blizzard winds groaning outside and stirring the young weeping willow just outside out dining room window.
My father and I tend to find the humor in things, the adventure in the situation, so we stopped from our business of unwrapping dishes and candlesticks and bundled up and went slipping and sliding up the hill of our street. It felt uphill going up and back down. We laughed the whole way. Everything was beige, white and gray, the colors of my current bedroom, though not near as comforting. It was stark and it was cold. We were housebound, no mail, no phone calls, no activity on the street for several days. My father wasn’t even required to report to his new job. You’d need to be able to get out and drive for that and only the street crews were doing that..
It was a slow opening for life in Kentucky. I applied for, and got a job working on the campus where my father would be working and gave myself a semester off to figure out what the map was going to look like. I was a restless soul, a dreamer, a writer of life experience even then, keeping journals and poetry. I never had to be anything but an introvert because I never had to introduce myself to “new”. But this? This would require me to venture out of my hobbit hole and dig out a new path. I could write a new sequel or a new book altogether. The first bit of business was changing my moniker back to my given name. All of my life I had been known as “Tammie”. It was a nickname. I wanted to be known by my given name so that is how I began to introduce myself. To this day, you will know who knows me from Illinois and who knows me from Kentucky by what they call me. I have extended a dispensation to my Illinois crowd. No one else receives that. 🙂 The name is Tamara, thank you.
As spring approached, my parents and I began visiting churches. Church is a part of the fabric of my life. I began attending before I was born. My father was the music director of wherever we attended most of my life. My mother frequently played the piano. One Sunday we decided on First Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky. It was close to home and seemed a nice place to start. The pastor talked with us afterward and told me about a nice young lady just my age who lived close to where we did. She was out of town but he would tell her about me. Within a few days the doorbell rang. And there she stood. I still remember what I had on, the moment was that significant to me; a navy blue one piece jumpsuit, white bodice, red short sleeves with stars on them. I was a regular walking American flag. “I’m so glad to see you I could kiss you right on the lips!” (My humor was passed down from my father) I bellowed and that was the beginning line to a friendship that has spanned what feels like 100 years. In many ways we’re alike, in some ways we are very different people. There’s room for us both but the most important thing is we both love purple. When we get together, about 4 times a year, we laugh until we wheeze. Our father’s were friends and my father would often visit him and talk cars or see him out at McDonald’s and enjoy coffee together.
“M” will be her name. Her father was a mechanic, first at a shop working for others, then taking it to his own backyard where his garage resembled Goober from Mayberry RFD; shout out to those of you who remember that show. M has lived in her house her whole life, inheriting it when her parents passed away several years ago. They purchased it in 1948, not even then were they the first owners. Theirs and 3 other homes sit in a row, all of them exactly the same or with only a few minor differences. Those families were neighbors for decades, sharing the ebb and flow of their lives. M often shared memories with the remaining elderly neighbors before she became the only remaining “original” herself; the neighbors remembering M’s mother teaching their children to drive, ride bicycles. Her home is a “time capsule”; not the stark eerie museum like way but the warm, comforting, “I am wrapped in my grandmother’s love” kind of way. There’s the tile in the bathroom, the hardwood floors, the woodwork and arched doorways. The long and peaceful back yard where we sit under the carport is adorned with signs, paintings, artifacts; some there when M’s father was alive, some added since then. She calls it her “Cracker Barrel” wall, documenting times of the past. Old kitchen cabinets before the remodel several years prior were hanging up on the wall. I was glad she had kept them. Behind a painted black door is what used to be her father’s garage. I snapped a picture, the feeling he’d just gone out for awhile lingering in the room, some of his tools and tool chest still remaining. I smiled as I remembered him in my mind’s eye, white hair under a cap, hands greasy with car oil, his voice loud from a hearing loss, his laugh contagious. He was a good man, a salt of the earth man. I miss him. I miss my dad.
M invites me to dinner a few times a year. The food is always meat and potatoes comfort kind of food. It satisfies and warms my bones and my heart. Last night was a golden hour kind of evening; the sun washing everything in warm light, the breeze just cool enough to not be hot, just warm enough to not be cold. We ate and took ourselves out to the carport to sit and remember when we would walk through the woods and down the hill to my house. We can’t do that anymore. There are houses where there used to be nothing just beyond the tree line of her yard. Her garden has already begun, apple trees replacing ones her father had once planted that had died off.
The breeze got cooler and we went inside for a surprise dessert; homemade ice cream and strawberries picked from her garden. I hadn’t had any in such a long time and my mind went back to visiting my grandparents’ house in the summer and having the relatives over. The men in the family took turns turning the old fashioned crank on the light blue ice cream freezer, the kids in the family getting to pack on more ice as we waited eagerly for it to be done, which took way too long to our way of thinking.
We retired to the comfy couch in her living room and found ourselves using her newly purchased “massage gun” on our shoulders and back and laughing at the difference in conversation from our 20’s. (As an aside, after using that thing, I slept better than I had in weeks, the knot in my shoulder having melted away. Highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bob+and+brad+massage+gun&crid=3TYZVX9CDZYQW&sprefix=bob+and+%2Caps%2C242&ref=nb_sb_ss_p13n-pd-dpltr-ranker_1_8 ) I sat looking around, seeing it as if I was looking at it from the past. Having moved from all the home I’d ever known to somewhere with no connection, M and her friendship had been the first root that grew here in Kentucky. I eventually looked forward more often than behind me. The tree of life sprouted leaves and flourished and Kentucky came to feel more like home, Illinois feeling like another lifetime.
I drove home, the road running along the Ohio River, the moon overhead, and thought about legacies, lives lived and the evidence of their hand print on our lives. I was glad M had preserved that, that it overlapped onto my life and caused my chest to tighten with tears just on the edge, remembering and grateful for it. M is a tree planted in my life, still there, still present, a part of my story. All of our stories matter. This one especially matters to me. M had a home made for her here in Kentucky and she has kept it. Thanks for making your home feel like my home. Thanks for the memories, M.