This vast house (I never counted the rooms when I was growing up there—too embarrassing!) was on the market for some months; it has been empty for several years after the inheritor, my older brother Barry died. His widow, Edie, lived and lives next door, and the great hulk, which very few people would ever imagine living in, remained empty.
A few weeks ago, I heard that a Los Angeles man with roots in Louisville had bought it to use for a party house, and my imagination instantly bloomed with images of huge drunken Derby parties beyond anything even my parents could have imagined. But then, suddenly, a younger member of the family, who must be nameless at this time, stepped forward and the house and its long and deeply shadowed history will become hers.
This transition relates in my mind to the painful post-partum depression I’m experiencing after packing up the papers on which I based my new book, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, and shipping them off to historical archives at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture at Duke—all change seems at certain moments in my life equally painful.
Yet I also recall Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who spoke here in Santa Fe at the WISC Symposium over the weekend, saying in her measured tones that the subtle discrimination against women in the world today is harder to combat than the overt discrimination of earlier times…
How this relates to the sale of the Big House and its lumbering movement into the next generation I really can’t say, yet there is a birth as well as a death involved, and I have a small piece in each of them…
james voyles says
Transitions are interesting, bittersweet. Memory and regret. I cannot wait to read The Blue Box and, then, your Doris Duke, and, then, your autobiography. Sail on, Sallie!
Thomas Lipscomb on Facebook says
I remember sleeping in your room there with a big classic KY wood and cannel coal fire…. one lovely Thanksgiving while everyone was still getting along…. and thinking about evil worth with the $20 bill at the Gas.
eleanor Bingham Miller says
So excited about the Blue Book reading in Louisville at Carmichael’s on Tuesday Sept 16th. Here’s wishing you an overflow crowd! Brava!!
Barbara says
There is lovely subtlety to this piece… and a lot rumbling around beneath.
Thomas Lipscomb on Facebook says
Give my best to the gutsy Eleanor….
Tim Furlong Jr. says
As the photographer who photographed this estate, I must say that it was truly an honor. I will forever cherish the time spent reviewing the completed images with Edie before they went public…that was very special. But, not as special as the estate being kept in the family. So glad to hear of this.
Until Then,
Tim
Thomas Lipscomb on Facebook says
So Edie kept it?
steve says
Was john grissett their caretaker ? If so can anyone tell me anything about the man. Thanks