Blackberry Winter

What is it about fruits, especially berries, and their many associations from childhood? My favorite bedtime story was about a black bear who got lost in the forest and found a thicket of blackberries to eat. I would make my mother or father tell it over and over and then think about it myself, as I fell to sleep. [Certainly it was a derivation of Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal, another favorite: kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk]

At my grandparents' farm in New Hampshire I couldn't wait to go to the pine woods with my grandmother or later run up myself to pick low bush blackberries and blueberries, and high bush blueberries later on in the summer. We had the occasional wild strawberry patch but nothing like I've seen on roadsides here in Kentucky.

In the Cuyahoga Valley in Ohio we'd go to an area park for a hike and often leave with pockets of blackberries, certainly well satisfied by our gorging. In Kentucky, while the wild blueberry does not grow here as it does throughout New Hampshire, blackberries are everywhere. They ripen in July and are a popular fruit for canning and preserves [one of the local vernacular cakes is called Blackberry Jam cake, almost like a fruit cake but with a caramel icing].

This week I heard a term for the first time (and I love regional expressions): Blackberry winter. This is a cold snap in May after the blackberries have bloomed and we are certainly having one now: a long stretch of cool, fall-like weather after the rains. I also learned today, in referring to our deed, that our property line falls along Cold Weather Creek. How appropriate, I thought (and soon at Cupcake Chronicles we will be reading Cold Comfort Farm), and the kind of place name I love.

"Blackberry Winter" would also make a great title for a novel or some such but of course, through a quick Google search, I have discovered that Robert Penn Warren, a Kentucky native, wrote a short story of the same name.

One of my favorite poems about blackberry picking is by Mary Oliver and simply called "August" when they ripen in the north. It is from her Pulitzer-prize winning collection American Primitive. We will soon be leaving the roses, strawberries, gooseberries and other things in our yard, not quite ready for picking. But we'll be back for blackberries when they fruit in July and hopefully into August.

August

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

Mary Oliver, American Primitive

NOTE: photo is of black raspberries near our compost bin in New Hampshire last summer...but close enough.

"Where Thou Art--that--is Home"

I am so looking forward to seeing two friends in Akron next week--actually The Cupcakes for those of you who follow that blog--and to going back to New Hampshire for a time--and yet so much is happening here I almost hate to step away from it all. But this is good because I will want to come back again in July. We are rooting here. I never thought in a million years that you could pry me out of New England and yet here I am: a modern day pioneer woman in the wilderness (well, hardly, but the whole getting in the wagon, even though that wagon has made a few return trips in recent months, and striking out for new territory has just held that image for me). Thank you for that poetic reminder, Edie (and Emily and Melissa): "Where Thou art––that––is Home." ––Emily Dickinson, 1863 [is that like the modern day: "No matter where you go, there you are!"?]

Among the non-reading and writing highlights of this week: I have helped to butcher a hog for our freezer at our Mennonite friends (did not participate in the actual slaughter, just the meat fixings); learned to make scrapple and sausage; designed a chicken house for pullets and laying hens that we are getting quotes on now; went in search of wildflowers of Kentucky (with camera, not clippers); worked on a book proposal with another writer; sold a condensed version of my blog on "Appalachian Homeplace," with two of my own photos, to Old-House Interiors (for their twice-annual publication, Early Homes); and am finalizing my talk for Stan Hywet next week in Akron.

More writing irons in the fire, and other non-bloggable developments, which are also good ~ and let's not forget my monthly Bunco gathering with new friends in nearby Casey County. And I have more blog fodder, and photos, too. In sum, I've done everything but clean up my office and better organize it: the story of my life (and married life, too, but I have a patient husband and at least I keep my piles to just one room). I can hear the childhood refrain now: "Cathy, you can't go out and play until you PICK UP YOUR ROOM!" [Yes, I was a clutterer-piler back then when I had very little to clutter and pile apart from books and dolls.]

I realize as I've tried to step away from this computer and blog world for a time that I really can't: it is too necessary for what I do, how I think, write and process stuff. But it hasn't hurt to try and regulate my time on it a bit more. After all, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her books on a tablet and typewriter, probably while multitasking in her farm kitchen. We know that Emily Dickinson certainly wrote (often in her pantry) and juggled household tasks. It's not impossible ~ one just has to be highly focused and organized.

These computers are supposed to give us more time, are they not? And yet I find them to be the ultimate time consumers. An hour later and there you are--if not writing "in the zone" as it were, I often ask myself what I have I done? "And you might ask yourself, how do I work this?"

One look at our Mennonite friends' cellar pantry (and this photo only shows half of their supply) and I realize how productive time can be. After a day of grinding up 74 pounds of sausage meat, packaging up scrapple and pork tenderloins for the freezer, and rendering and canning 16 quarts of lard it was not hard to compare the difference between that productivity, however combined it was in labor force, and 3,000 words on a good day.

There is also an inescapable Zen-like quality to working like this, in the moment and the task, with a productive output at the end of the day. Writing is similar, yes, but it is more self-absorbed and doesn't always keep the children fed and in clothing. Meanwhile, there are times when my own children probably think I prefer writing to their company. This is a hard thing for me and one reason I'm trying to better regulate my writing time. And yet, I can't imagine not ever writing. It has always been a part of who I am and want to be.

Kentucky Writer's Day at Penn's Store

This weekend is part of the Kentucky Writer's Day celebration at Penn's Store in Gravel Switch, Kentucky. In the United States, Penn's Store is the oldest continuously operated store by the same family since 1850. It is a small wood building with a front porch and a metal-clad shed roof, typical of most older stores around here that you can often find used, or abandoned, on old country roads. The main part was the store and the smaller room under the shed dormer was often the local post office. The difference with Penn's Store is its continuous family history and preservation of most of its original features, including its settled wooden floor with old black linoleum on it.

The store is located in Casey County but right at the juncture of two other counties. It was built facing southeast and right near a creek. Behind the store is a steep bank and a spring and right now the wild delphinium are blooming, followed soon by a mountain poppy (neither of which I've ever seen in the wild--Kentucky wildflowers will never cease to amaze and delight).

Jeanne Penn Lane and her daughter, Dawn Lane Osborn, are keeping the store going today. Dawn is a singer and Jeanne has had a diverse career spanning from songwriter for Chet Atkins to art teacher in the local schools. Jeanne is the life and blood of the place and a visit there would not be complete without pulling up to the counter and having a good chat. She is both welcoming and interesting to talk with, a rare combination but not unusual in Kentucky. Two years ago she was one of the first people we met down here.

Last year Temple and I both spoke at the store. He wove a few Yankee yarns and I read from The Pantry, which had just been printed and was about to be released by my publisher, so it was hot off the press. We were glad to participate (although we were both a bit nervous) but this year wanted to help out behind the scenes and just enjoy the day (especially as, apart from blogs, I had nothing written or published this year). Next year I will have some new things to read that I've been working on.


Catherine and Blaine Staat, Temple Pond & Joberta Wells
share a laugh and some pie from T.N.T. Barbecue in Lebanon, Kentucky

Our friends Blaine and Catherine Staat read from one of their columns in the local weekly paper, The Casey County News, called "He Said, She Said." They moved here two years ago, and like us, were drawn to the region for a simpler way of life off the fast track. Cat's magazine, Making It Home, now exclusively a blog and website, appeals to the kind of lifestyle about which some women might want but are afraid to ask. It appeals to another era and time which is what I like about it as I balance my own interests in the past with the modern world. She still keeps a blog, as does Blaine, who has recently become the director of the Liberty-Casey County Chamber of Commerce. Another local columnist, also for the Casey County News, Joberta Wells, brought the house down with her talk of underwire bras, having too many cats, and poorly made butterscotch pies, to name but a few topics of resonance and humor.

Some of the group that comes each year, the writing students of Dr. H.R. Stoneback at SUNY/New Paltz and Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society Members, were down a week earlier so Jeanne accommodated them with a special day last week. Today there is another afternoon of writers and performers (who also perform as part of the weekend at Woody's in nearby Danville). Moderator, since its beginnings, Terry Ward is humanities chair at St. Catharine's College in Springfield. Behind the scenes is Jeanne Penn Lane, quite comfortable behind her counter talking with people who come into the store for a cold drink, bologna sandwich or souvenir and not really wanting to be the center of things outside.


Jeanne Penn Lane handcrafts and paints many of the items
sold at Penn's Store, including these charming outhouses

Like Penn's Store itself, including the infamous Great Outhouse Blowout held each September (this year on September 6), Kentucky Writer's Day has become a tradition and an annual rite of spring in knob region. As with so many places off the beaten track, Penn's Store is well worth the journey. It is just several miles from the town of Gravel Switch, off Route 68, amidst the historically savvy community of Forkland. Don't expect anything cutesy or "real old timey shoppe" type stuff. Penn's Store is the authentic deal--it is what it is--and that is what makes it so precious and worth preserving.

Speaking of writing, I will not be blogging for a while--perhaps just a bit over on Cupcakes--as I need to hit the garden, office, and prepare a presentation (not necessarily in that order!) and am forcing myself to have a self-imposed blog-a-torium for a time. Check back sometime after May 9th. As they say here on the ridge, in lieu of goodbye, "you all come back when you're ready."

Flippin Towards Bugtussle

Now for anyone who used to follow The Beverly Hillbillies, the character of Jed hailed from Bugtussle (I had not remembered that fun fact, but my husband certainly has all of these years and he corrected me in saying that Granny, Jed's mother-in-law, came from Tennessee). There is no actual place in that state but Bugtussle, Kentucky is right on the north central border of Tennessee and is, allegedly, the origin of the place name selected by the show's writers and presumably where the character of Jed came from, too.

Regardless of where Jed, Jethro, Ellie Mae and Granny really hailed from in their fictional hills, as with all of the zany rural sitcoms of that era, stereotypes abounded. But wasn't it fun to watch? I always thought Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale and his sidekick, Jane Hathaway, who defined the female version of "lock jaw" elocution, were bigger rubes than the hillbillies themselves, and perhaps that was the point. If this program were to be recast today it should have hedge fund managers in McMansions paired with genuinely down home country people (which they are in comparison). Mike Huckabee could even make a special appearance and cook some squirrel and dumplings that, one of these days, we plan to try here at our house.

So imagine our surprise a few years ago when we first came to Kentucky to look for a place to live, immediately bought our first Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer, and found Bugtussle. As it happens it is on the way to my Uncle Bob's in Lafayette (pronounced LaFAYette), Tennessee and we drove through it last Saturday. Because I had forgotten to bring my recharged camera battery, we went back today. [Have camera, will take a lot of pictures ~ just ask my long-suffering family who has to a hear a regular, "turn around! I want to stop!"]

At the Bugtussle General Store, which is all there is in downtown Bugtussle, we enjoyed talking with Shirley the store keeper (yes, Cupcakes, it's true--I believe I've found the real Shirley!) . Originally from South Dakota, she told us she is starting a Hen gathering once a month at her store: "no roosters and no chicks under sixteen" is her rule. Like me, she's found that it can be hard for country women to get together, especially when people are more dispersed here. [I am enjoying Bunco, thanks to the kindness of a new friend.]

Shirley also mentioned that Buddy Ebsen visited Bugtussle in the 1960s before filming began on The Beverly Hillbillies and that Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, often featured on the show and who sang its theme song, had played nearby with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys and then suggested the name for Jed's hometown to the writers.

The general store sells a variety of bulk foods and other products and is not touristy in any way, which is part of its charm. [I wanted a t-shirt or some such that said, "I Got Bit in Bugtussle" but they aren't marketing the place, and why should they? Besides how many nuts wander in because of making an obtuse association with a now 40-year old television program?] Nearby is Bugtussle Farm, an organic farm and CSA. We want to go back to that another time.

Along the way to Bugtussle is the community of Flippin. Well, I had to take the photo of the church sign because it was too irresistible. Whatever your religious preference, I hope you find the humor in this sign as we did. Country churches and chapels are everywhere here in Kentucky (we have three on our ridge in Nancy) and their names are often the only indication that you are in a certain place. I find it somehow comforting to see so many along the way and a fair diversity of denominations at that. I know, even for the agnostic among us, that the Bible Belt harbors a great deal of well-intentioned thought and prayer. It is "Spring Revival" time here in the hills and hollers and, while baptisms are no longer held down in the rivers and creeks, it is a time of renewal for these small congregations.

Kentucky place names are perhaps the most enchanted names I've encountered in the United States. Reading through the many names in the Gazetteer is like seeing through the "Magic Mirror" of a geographical Romper Room. There are over 12,000 named places (including features like knobs and hollows) in Kentucky and each seems uniquely inspired. I am not making fun --I am amazed by these locales as if some cosmic writer found the best and most unusual name for each of these special places: small hamlets and larger communities, knobs and ridges and hollows and creeks that have harbored homeplaces, memories, and personal histories. As I learn of these places or experience them firsthand, I want to know everything about them: their landscapes, their buildings, their histories. So I start by soaking it all into my visual and geographic memory.

You have your animal names: Raccoon, Pig, Possum, Fox, Wolf, Black Gnat, Black Snake, Bee, Beetle, Honeybee, Crowtown, Butterfly, Spider, Whippoorwill, Blue Heron, Turkey, Trout, Fish Trap, Cowcreek to name but a few.

Places with fruit or plant names: Berry, Mulberry, Cherry, Crab Orchard, Apple Grove, Peach Grove, Plum Springs, Mint Springs, Ginseng, Pumpkin Chapel and many more garden-related. [A chapel devoted to pumpkins? Isn't that the most marvelous image?] There is every tree name imaginable in every combination with a knob, grove, hill or creek.

There are first names or derivatives represented: Cynthiana, Eli, Elias, Elihu, Henry Clay, Patsey, Judy, Thomas, Charlotte Furnace, Bill Hollow, even Bobtown and NoBob (and Temple Hill), all of which have my immediate and some extended family and friends almost covered. Then there are surnames: Guy, Powell Valley, Mack Hollow, Daley, Manton, Willard, Johnson Crossroads, Pondsville etc. which all have friend and family associations. If your name or surname is English in origin it is likely to be in Kentucky.

For the foodies who I know read this blog, imagine living in these places: Lick Skillet, Beefhide, Big Bone, Chicken Bristle, Butcher Hollow, Mash Fork, Honey Grove, Mint Springs, Teaberry, Tea Cup Cliff, or Marrowbone? Imagine a home in Summer Shade, Pleasant Valley, Harmony Village, Happy, Bliss or Beauty? Or one in Cyclone, Hazard, Quicksand, Greasy Creek, Poverty or Penile? [Perhaps my favorite--and I haven't even gone through all of the names yet--is Glade. To me that has always been one of the best words in the English language. It rolls off the tongue and I imagine a cool, woodland, even magical, place.]

On the way home we stopped in Glasgow to check out some antique shops and didn't find anything we needed, which is just as well, although Temple found a decent copy of The Hole Book for which he'd been searching (an old children's book with a hole right through it that is incorporated into the story), and then took a more winding way through Columbia and back again into Casey County. [Along one several mile stretch in Adair County we drove through the settlements of Christine, Ella and Eunice. I wonder if they were sisters? Between two of these hamlets is Purdy.]

We always go the back roads if we have the time and I am the atlas or gazetteer reader while my husband drives. Young children--and adults--should learn how to read a map. Take a Sunday drive again with your family or loved one. Even in this time of higher priced gasoline, it is a way to reconnect with ourselves and each other. Forget your satellite tracking devices: open a map and explore your world, the place that you live. Happy Earth Day!

All is calm, all is bright...just about

Field on the Knob with Mennonite Tractors

This week has been interesting here on the ridge, and beyond it. Last Friday we lost our dog in a violent thunderstorm (and found her again, two days later, thanks to some neighbors we had just met while searching for her). That day I had been transplanting tomato seedlings at a friends' greenhouse, Hillside Greenhouse at Sunny Valley Foods (in Casey County--formerly Nolt's--one of these days I'll stop saying that!) and had left our dog Lucy out when I left that morning. She hates storms and I had not anticipated one. Well, didn't we have "a humdinger" mid-afternoon as my father used to say--complete with a tornado warning.


Ida's barn and red buds

Aside from the scare and anguish of almost loosing Lucy, we have been watching the glorious pageant of redbud unfold on the land. That has been some comfort amidst the worry.


Red bud and Green River Knob

I was glad to get a photo of Green River Knob, the highest point in Casey County, with a lovely redbud in bloom in front of it. Redbuds seem to like semi-open spaces and are most common along fields and roadsides. The wild dogwood is just beginning to bloom and I was pleased to see lilacs beginning to open in northern Tennessee.

Yesterday we stopped in Bugtussle, Kentucky, right on the Tennessee line, on our way to visit my uncle and his wife (of course, brought camera, forgot recharged battery pack--more about this destination, too, after we return there next week). We also saw a fair bit of damage from the tornado that hit Lafayette, Tennessee in early February and hopped along a track up towards where we live, approximately 2 hours northeast in Kentucky. It was humbling to see what these storms can do.

This evening a neighbor brought me an intriguing gift: a mason jar partially filled with a clear liquid with a piquant odor. Let's just say it is a good "recipe" in the old tradition, something I've never tasted. I'll write more about that another day, too.

All is calm, all is bright now on the ridge as evening slips in. The cooler night air is coming in the window after a warm afternoon, but it is 8:45pm and still not quite dark (who knew how I would benefit from being on the very western edge of the Eastern time zone?). The night sounds like summer with birds nesting and that not-quite-crickety sound, but no longer are there peepers. Our neighbor to the north is having his nightly holler to the elements (can't quite explain that ritual but he's harmless enough). There, he is done now (well, not quite, a few more hollers at nothing in particular).


Tornado watch on Carter Ridge

Tomorrow the boys and my husband are going squirrel hunting with a neighbor. Temple has had squirrel and dumplings in the past. I'm willing to try just about anything but they'd better not bring them to me to skin! No doubt our boys will find this to be the highlight of their spring vacation--and I'll bet they'll taste great with cornbread (squirrel, that is, not boys!).

Better Living through Lard?

When this ad came in today in an e-mail from my friend Edie I thought that it couldn't possibly be true. Well, of course not--but a great laugh all the same. The pseudo-ad originally appeared in a British satire magazine called Viz.

I found the image of the healthy woman running through a field on the FatBlokeThin website. She has no doubt just eaten a "Lard Bar". Written by a British man who has been chronicling his battle of the bulge for the past several years, the site seems worth returning for another look. [And how refreshing to have a man's viewpoint on these concerns for a change.]

But I digress. The point of all of this is that when I received Edie's e-mail I realized that I had been wanting to blog about fried chicken for some time. I've made it three times now in the past two months. I soak it in buttermilk, dredge each piece by hand in a flour-paprika-salt and seasoning combo that I mix together, and fry it in a deep lidded skillet in Crisco oil. The second time was the best, the first time so-so, and the other night a bit rushed. The trick is to get the oil hot and sustain that heat without burning it. This is no easy thing to accomplish without screaming at your kids and husband to stay away from the dangerous stove environment while juggling the rest of dinner, too. And another side effect is that the house stinks of fat for a day or so afterwards.

The other night I made four meatloaves, from The Amish Cookbook--Recollections and Recipes from an Old Order Amish Family (this was one of the best meatloaf recipes I've made and I've tried a lot of meatloaf recipes over the years), my third attempt at fried chicken, buttered noodles, green beans, and cornbread. I also served applesauce on hand (made two falls ago) and tried a new cornbread recipe. Rhubarb cobbler for dessert (sort of make shift and I've done better).

We had three Mennonite men to dinner who have been putting our 45-acre field back into hay (after many years in soybeans with the former owner). They have it limed, tilled and planted now, just in time for more spring rains on Saturday. Our neighbors Larry and Josh also joined us. The food was a hit but I don't think I'll be deep frying for a while! Just too messy (and I'm fairly mess-tolerant). But we had a jolly time around the table and I was the only woman among six men and our two boys. Farm livin' is the life for me, gals.

I was pleased with the cornbread, an easy recipe from The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, compiled by the people at Foxfire. [I have the Gramercy Books edition published in 2001, but this cover with the pig on it is much more appealing.] This recipe--one of seven in the cookbook for cornbread and one of many using cornmeal--requires lard. It is the first time I've used it, apart from years ago when I made my great-grandmother's German Christmas Cookie recipe as a treat for my father (I'll post that at the holidays).

Corn Bread
by Annie Long [for Foxfire]

• 2 cups cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg, beaten
• 2 cups sour milk (I used fresh buttermilk)
• 2 tablespoons melted lard

Sift cornmeal (or stir) to get bran out (I didn't do this). Measure the cornmeal, soda, and salt and sift together (I just stirred it--I also added about a tablespoon of sugar). Mix in beaten egg, milk and melted lard. Pour into a hot greased iron skillet and bake in a 425 degree oven (until done--about 20-25 minutes). Serves 6-8.

Catherine's NOTE: Melt lard in your skillet on the stove top, then pour and stir quickly into the cornmeal mixture and pour back in again to the same skillet to bake in the oven. Bread is moist and flavorful, but not too moist, not too dry.

Appalachian Homeplace

In the past few years since we first came to Kentucky, I became aware of an interesting term: homeplace. This word is used in reference to the place where a person or remembered family member was born and raised or as, "that was Margaret's homeplace over on Tick Ridge". I have also learned that it can be a term of reverence. Homeplaces are more often than not abandoned houses, left to time and circumstance, exactly as they were when the last occupant lived there. [See also my blog entry from last April on our neighbor's farm, Another Homeplace]

Devoid or pilfered of their contents, all that remains are the weathered clapboards and other architectural fixtures. They are ruins on the landscape, almost a part of the land, and there is a haunting beauty and sorrow in their remains. The English landscape gardeners on the great estates might have appreciated them and the Romantic poets would have certainly immortalized them.

I also sense that these places are left as much as through benign neglect as for their associations. This is where the reverence factor enters in: the houses are often left alone, unoccupied, because of those who lived there. We know a family who picnics each year at their family homeplace, now empty of furnishings, and used for their annual family reunion, never to be rented or sold. Around it are fields and forests, still in the family (in fact, purchased back by a daughter). Otherwise, it is an abandoned lonely place, likely never to be inhabited again.

My husband and I are drawn to these places, which is ironic because we sold the New Hampshire farm that was in my family for almost sixty years (the land is all now being preserved with conservation easements) and have listed for sale our large Federal home, Whitcomb House. [But these are other stories, complex and varied, and often detailed in this blog--see one of the entries on my family farm, Home Place.] Once common in New England during the Depression and earlier decades, well before the era of village improvement societies, older homes there are restored, and sometimes inappropriately. Finding a homeplace in its original unaltered state is like Mecca for me. It is preservation in its most rudimentary sense which is preserving something in its pure form.

Last week we "foraged" around a particular house that we had passed before. Not seeing any "No trespassing" signs or an adjacent owner's house to ask permission, we poked around and took nothing but photographs. Any house foraging can be dangerous, if not illegal, especially as the floor was treacherous and the place had been used recently as a hay barn. Exploring these buildings any later in the season can also be encumbered by the emergence of snakes, often poisonous. [I do intend to find and contact the owner to tell them we were there and to perhaps get some oral history on the house.]


Inside were original features from the late 19th century, including seven visible layers of wallpaper in the entry hall, its own visual chronology of time and taste proclivities, spanning from the Aesthetic period in the 1870s or so, to a flocked Gothic paper, to pink and gray Edwardian grandeur, to 1940s ivy, through 1950s Colonial Revival townscapes.

Built-in kitchen cupboards, probably painted in the 1930s, seemed to be the only evidence of a pantry, as the original footprint of the house had remained. Inside the cupboards there is the distinctive utilitarian green paint from the Depression era that has made a comeback in recent years and the surrounding kitchen was ample and spacious. Except for the ell, the house was reminiscent to us of the one that was originally on the location of our doublewide, that a former owner recently told us about: it had 2 large stone end chimneys, was one room deep, with two large downstairs and upstairs rooms and a "dog trot" hallway between them.

This particular house that we photographed also had an ell with a large hall dividing the main house from the kitchen, probably for additional air and ventilation and to keep the heat away from the main house in summer. A double entry porch, a common vernacular type in Kentucky, was also added at one time (we did not dare go upstairs for fear of falling through the floor). Outside is an old smokehouse, a common outbuilding still found in this region.

Another possible reason for the old homeplace phenomenon here in Kentucky is that, unlike in the Northeast and other parts of the country where property taxes are so high, these buildings are not taxed. So they can be more easily left where and as they are. The land around them is primarily used for agriculture or you might see a newer home built beside the old (or a trailer plopped in front). I wonder, also, if because most people did not have cameras or any other means to document their lives in these houses, that this visual record is a timeless reminder of the old home. One of our neighbors still has his parents' homeplace on another farm and he keeps it as it was. "Sometimes I go in and it still smells as it used to when they lived there." I, too, have a powerful scent memory of the places I have lived and that I often haunt in my dreams. There is also the unavoidable reality: that crushing poverty and an inability to afford to restore these houses has allowed their preservation, however ruinous.



There is sentiment in speaking of these places, but there is no dwelling in them. The homeplace lingers as a remnant of a past. In their preservation they slowly return to the land. There is beauty in that, at least for the newly transplanted outsider who also happens to be an architectural historian. In our culture today, where families are separated by states and sometimes continents, there is also something reassuring and familial about them. They are the domestic remains of our nation's farming history and stand resolute against the McMansion era in which we live. The ruinous old homeplace is the antithesis of the vinyled, Mansarded, overblown suburban home of today. Where those houses are incongruous on the land, like jarring gewgaws, the decrepit homeplace seems a natural part of its environs.

My friends Susan Daley and Steve Gross, who shot the principal photography for The Pantry, are soon to release their new book, Time Wearing Out Memory: Schoharie County, with W.W. Norton & Company. Almost twenty years ago, I met Sue and Steve at a shoot for the Gibson House Museum, a Victorian time capsule in Boston, for Victoria Magazine.

Over the years our friendship has strengthened over a love of old places, especially the delight in discovering old houses (and working together for my own book). Like me, Sue had never quite understood the term "homeplace" before, even though that is what they often document in their photography. She did, however, refer me to a classic photograpy book by Wright Morris called The Home Place.

Their latest book documents the architectural remains of time in upstate New York, in many ways another place of forgotten Appalachian existence. They see places for what they are and as they are and I look forward to discovering more of their photographic excellence and discerning eye for historic--and often haunting and ruinous--architecture. Check out their Schoharieology blog on their new book, featuring images from Schoharie County, New York and other information. In many ways, that beautiful region of upper New York state reminds me of the knobs and hollows of Kentucky. Kindred places, kindred spirits.

Appalachian Spring

One of the delights of moving into a new home in winter is that you don't know what to expect in the spring. When we first saw our home beneath its very own knob (Kentucky speak for big f@#$ing hill) it was at the end of August during one of the worst droughts the region has experienced.

We could tell the landscape had been well tended (Miss Lillian was an accomplished gardener when she was able) and was more "park like" than most. Because of the dry weather we only saw drought-hardy plants blooming: a purple butterfly bush, an orange trumpet vine, and the biggest red hibiscus flowers I'd ever seen. Here and there were some annuals that had self sown on the parched earth, like bachelor buttons and petunias. Our boys were glad to find some moldering tomatoes and melon in the remnants of a small and weedy vegetable garden.

Every day for the past several weeks we have watched the yard and land unfold: glorious prolonged forsythia, a scrim of green on the trees in the woods, daffodils in drifts along roadsides and in fields (often indicative of the location of a former homeplace), and now the redbud is just pinking up on the edges of fields and in the woods. Soon it will be a glorious pageant of pink and green on the land. [I promise more photos to come although I have to say I'm growing increasingly upset with the clarity of my digital CanonRebel images--to the point where I am tempted to go back to film.]

In our own yard we continue to make daily discoveries. Peonies are poking themselves out of the soil, clumps of day lilies have announced their presence, and various other perennials have emerged. On the northside of the doublewide (which sits on the site of the old homeplace that was here--another blog about that to come one day) are several hellebores in pink and white that started blooming early in March. A large rose over an arbor, a Constance Spry according to the tag, is thick and vigorous and needs some trimming (and fish emulsion soon to prompt its blooming). Large mats of grass here and there have declared themselves to be grape hyacinth or what we call "cemetery pinks" and some plants we still don't know if they're weed or wanted flora.














All winter we have had watercress growing at the base of our spring which flows into a small pond. I will have to pick some of our own. I've never tried the wild, natural variety and understand it was a readily available source of nutrients and greens for mountain people. Mistletoe, a parasitic inedible evergreen, hangs in twiggy green balls from their oak tree hosts (I will blog about this in the mistletoe season). Hickory nut and black walnuts abound. Green carpets of myrtle (called "periwinkle" here) bloom beneath barren trees. Ramps and morels (also called "land fish" by the locals) will be coming out in the woods over the coming weeks before the canopy of leaves appears in the forest. Near the end of April the trillium and wild iris and so many other wildflowers will be in bloom in the woods, lush and damp with spring rains.

Today while our oldest son was mowing the lawn, which smells of wild onion after it is cut, we made more discoveries. Two bushes which we think are cultivated blueberries, some sort of indiscernible ground cover which looks like a kind of lamium, and a corner of the old vegetable garden has a grape vine and a mass of strawberries while another has what I think is garlic. I was delighted to see that several bushes that we thought were lilacs indeed are as they announced their purplish buds and distinctive foliage this week and several more appear to be "bridal wreath", both bushes that we have around our New Hampshire village home.

Now our lilac season--and our entire spring--will be extended by several weeks each year as we will enjoy them up there in May. The spring will stretch itself slowly towards New England as we head there ourselves for part of each summer. In New Hampshire, spring is a month of mud, followed by a week of spring, followed by an almost immediate summer. For a few weeks in May, when it is at its most glorious, the black flies emerge and hang about until late June: from Mother's Day to Father's Day we always said.

We have many vegetable and fruit options locally with the Mennonite farms and because we will be back in New Hampshire for part of the summer I am trying not to get too excited about a garden right now. I might plant some beets and other things that we can enjoy upon return in August and that might survive on rain alone. But this longer growing season needs some getting used to, that's for certain. Here they traditionally plant potatoes on Good Friday, early this year. By early May you can have just about anything in the ground. In New Hampshire, sometimes you are lucky to have tomatoes in the ground in the first week of June.

So we will watch our emerging landscape and make needed tweaks in the fall. I have apple mint ready to plant for iced tea, which we've started to make again now that the weather has warmed. Our neighbor Ida gave me a big potted tomato today (with a ripe tomato!) and I will pot that and put it on the porch. I am planting pansies, because I love their smiling colorful faces, for some hanging baskets that we can enjoy before it gets too hot--which it will and they will not be happy then unless tucked into a shady corner.

My husband, excited about the leaves and flowers coming out after a drizzly and dreary Kentucky winter, was talking with our friend and neighbor Larry. "Yes, but," Larry cautioned, "this is the time when the snakes come out." At least we won't have mosquitoes or black flies here, as in New Hampshire, but I suppose every Eden must have its snakes.

Benefit Auction

We spent the morning today at the Casey County Benefit Auction (the 14th annual). Run by the local Mennonite community, to help a family with medical expenses or in other insurmountable need, the day-long auction includes all manner of vehicles, farm tools, household goods, plants and livestock (Bertha over at the Cupcakes would have gone crazy with all of those chickens!).

There was also an excellent bake sale, chicken barbecue and soft vanilla ice cream churned by a horse on a treadmill (imagine if they had such a thing for humans ~ we could earn our ice cream by burning it off first). Probably one of the most bizarre contraptions I've seen--but just as humane as having a horse pull a plow, I suppose.

The auction was held at the corner of interstate route 127 (famous for its huge yard sale the first week of August each year) and state route 501, the road into the heart of the Mennonite community in Casey County, Kentucky. It is a small but prosperous community with several businesses and is what brought us to the area for the first time two years ago (that and the Bread of Life Café, run by the Galilean Children's Home). Fortunately, it is not touristy and kitschy like Holmes County, Ohio and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania have become. We shop regularly at all of these businesses and it certainly beats having to drive into Somerset to deal with traffic and big box stores.

The best part for us--we did not bid on any animals because we are still not set up to have them (next year!)--was just milling around enjoying the atmosphere and seeing many people that we've met or befriended, do business with, and are beginning to know. It made us feel all the more a part of things which is always a good feeling to have in a new place.

The bake sale was packed with pies, breads, cakes, whoopie pies (oatmeal and chocolate) and these lovely little mini-pies, which, at 60 cents were a steal, I thought (so I wouldn't take any change). I have only tried a butterscotch but it was melt-in-your mouth. We also got apricot, apple, and lemon (and a larger cherry pie). Temple picked out a sponge cake (which came on its own plate to keep!) and some whoopie pies. The chicken just fell off the bone and made a great early lunch. The kids loved the ice cream, too.

We were also glad to learn, quietly, that one of our friends, who has suffered medical hardship, and his family will be the recipients of the proceeds this year. The Amish and Mennonite communities pull together to help their own in times of need and that was gratifying to see in action. While there are some old order Amish around, mostly Mennonites have settled in Casey County. Their clothes are a bit less plain: different hats, no beards for married men, and more jolly prints and colors for the women's dresses.

You will note that I have discreetly photographed a few gatherings of Mennonite people. Out of respect to them I did my best to conceal their identities.

Morning is glad on the hills...

Tree on Hopeful School Road, Pulaski County, Kentucky

Morning is glad on the hills.
The sky sings in blue tones.
Little blue fleurs are early blooming now.
I do so like blue.
It is glad everywhere.

When I grow up I am going to write a book
about the glad of blues.
The earth sings in green.

from Opal by Opal Whiteley
[Opal's journal arranged and adapted by Jane Boulton, Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc.: 1976]

We are reading this enchanting book, compiled from bits of journals and blank verse that Opal Whiteley wrote as a young girl, with the Cupcakes this month. When I opened the book this morning, my first book selection on my new library card from the new Pulaski County Library, it fell upon this passage.

It has been a busy few weeks and many "must blog" moments have gone unrecorded. Spring is coming to the ridge and that is always hopeful. I will try to blog more frequently here now that I am settled again (but sometimes my interest is divided between blogs!).

Another Home Place

A new home or place creates a tentative grasp. At first it may be a loose thread. Perhaps it strengthens in time into a cord that tightens until it knots in the heart and pulls with all of its might. Or it loosens and frays and just doesn't take. I am starting to feel the tightening. It's like a quickening of sorts, a soaring of thought and feeling. A connection with a place that runs deeper than being merely transient: a connection as primeval as the early settlers must have felt as they forged up the creeks and cleared off the ridge tops. There could be trepidation and fear, as with any new venture. Sometimes there was loneliness, even sorrow about leaving a familiar place for an unexplored territory. But once the decision was made, the wagon packed and on its way, it was all about finding the right place to pull aside and settle in.

That decision would have been part intuition, part connective, part necessity. "There is water in the spring, abundant plants and animals: Let us live here." They hunted or had all they needed in the woods and creeks. They worked and cleared the land and became a part of it--eventually they farmed. They built crude cabins and sometimes moved on, leaving them there for someone else to find and inhabit. What they didn't have, they didn't need.



This is our fourth visit to Kentucky in a year. When we came down last April we were on an exploratory mission--part tourists, part investigative reporters. We wanted to visit various places we had heard about and talk with people around the state. Things seemed to link together--almost effortlessly in retrospect--until we found ourselves here a year later even more certain of our choices. We saw three farm places last year with a realtor: two in Casey County outside of Liberty and another in Pulaski County. All are in Knob country in south central Kentucky, between the higher Appalachian mountains in the eastern part of the state and the flatter beginnings of prairie to the west. Here gently rolling hills stretch into large open ridges, where pastures and woods taper down to hollows with stone-lined creeks.



The third place was a charm. Part ridge, part bottom, we loved the peace and quiet, the meandering creek, two pastures and woodlands, and the one car an hour average past the property (if that). A month later we came back to buy it. We soon met our neighbors on one ridge and on this visit met others. While we are still finding our way down here, we feel that each direction we have taken has been positive and productive--like a trail of crumbs has been left out for us and we are finding them with no trouble before the vultures descend. Sometimes the way should be this easy, even if we do happen to rely on a trusty Kentucky gazetteer kept handy in our car and an inner compass for true north (more or less).



We visited our land many times this week amidst warm spring weather and shared it with our boys for the first time since we first looked at it a year ago (our teenage daughter said she will come down when we get our house built). Wildflowers have been in the woods and hollows in abundance: may apples, banks of white and pink trillium (the occasional purple one), emerging bloodroot, clutches of wild miniature iris, and other flowers I'd never seen. Cardinals and blue birds dart back and forth across the fields and road sides. Cattle bellow across the pastures.



The boys found rocks and geodes as they waded in the creek while I met with a neighbor in the hollow who is trying to identify the remnants of a kitchen garden. He showed me what a wild onion looks like and where a patch of strawberries has gone wild. My husband toured the land with several people to talk about projects and to learn more of its history. There is a quiet and serenity here--far removed from any major road or highway (we are two miles from a narrow state road)--that my husband and I have rarely experienced in our own rural backgrounds.



Today I walked up to our land with our neighbor Margaret, down a dirt road from their farm and about half a mile across the ridge. We went to the rise of field which forms part of our north boundary along their farm. "I've lived on this ridge for 53 years and I've never stood in this field!" she said. Having worked their own fields, of course, and growing up on a farm on a nearby ridge, she would have never thought to come here without permission or a need to do so. The cabin once on our land in the hollow had long ago been dismantled and taken away--only three barns are there to remind anyone that this was once a home place. The top of the ridge, in the field where we stood, has no signs of habitation apart from an open pasture. As long as Margaret has been living on the ridge, there has not been another woman or family on this land to visit.



I asked her where she would put the house--she showed me the same spot I have been thinking about, on the highest part of the field facing southwest towards the breezes and fullest light, with a porch on the front and a small kitchen ell off the back (in true Kentucky cabin style). We could see with the emerging leaves on the trees that you could just catch a glimpse of their farm to the northeast. I agreed with her choices and we spoke about the right spot for a garden, a barn or two, and the boys raising calves. We walked back the half mile to their farm and Margaret picked a yellow flower that she had never seen before. In her own kitchen off the back of her house, she placed it in a small cup of water. "I like to put flowers on my kitchen window sill because I like to look at them," she said. [In her garden near the house she grows potatoes, corn, beans, zucchini, and sometimes beets, which she pickles to perfection. And lots of flowers.] We talked about recipes and how we tried to make more time for handwork (she crochets, I knit). I was glad she could share some time with me before she had to do the evening's milking with her son Frankie, who often helps her.



Elza, Margaret's husband, grew up in the home place just down from their present farm house, which they still own but that hasn't been inhabited since earlier in their marriage. One interesting thing about this part of the world is that when farms are bought or people move out of old houses, the structures are often just left there, abandoned--houses, barns, sheds, outhouses. Often new houses are built nearby while the old ones are just left there for nature to reclaim them. This is not a part of the country where there are gee-gaw houses and suburban cul-de-sacs. In earlier days, when Kentucky was wilderness, it was not unusual for settlers to move on and for another family to either move in or salvage the materials for their own cabins. Now these structures and their stray gatherings of outbuildings are rural ruins, unintentional follys in the landscape. There is a melancholy, even poetic beauty, in their decay and yet I can't imagine the land here without these former home places. I suppose it is better that they remain this way--if not to be restored--than to be torn down and forgotten entirely. In this condition of benign neglected state of preservation they are at least reminders of another time, of other settlements and people. Now they are scattered ghost houses on the land.

After our walk, and when Elza and Frankie returned with my husband after a tour around the land, Margaret surprised our youngest son on his seventh birthday with a cake and ice cream. Much to their delight, Frankie took the boys on several rides around the farm on the four-wheeler that he uses to herd cattle and for farm work. A few days before Margaret invited us in to a delicious supper of ham, cornbread, creamed corn, beans, fried potatoes (all from her garden) and fried apples. She had prepared that meal in no time at all after milking over 60 cows at the end of the day. We feel blessed by their kindnesses and we have yet to even build our house. We have rarely felt more welcomed.



Daniel Boone wrote in an account of 1771, when Kentucky was indeed a frontier: "I returned home to my family, being determined to bring them as soon as possible at the risk of my life and fortune, to reside in Kentucky, which I esteemed a second paradise." Our neighbors have lived all of their lives on this ridge or the adjacent one, seldom leaving because of the responsibilities on their farm. Frankie said that he has been many places but whenever he has been away, he has always wanted to come back. Elza cautioned that we would soon be homesick for Kentucky and that once we got settled we would never want to leave. After our recent visit here this week I am beginning to understand why. When some where starts to pull on you, that is where you should be.