Both houses, uninhabitable due to size in both cases and dereliction in one, will continue as housing for myths, the myths that always throng around fortunes and obscure most of the facts about the fortune-makers lives.
Neighbors…
The truth is that progressive ideas, whether about equality or water quality, have never taken root here; those are the seeds that fall on rocky ground, sprout and rapidly wither.
Icebox to Refrigerator
When I was growing up in Kentucky, an enormous wooden box with chrome handles on its many doors crouched in the back pantry, a dark room that I felt was not really safe. Why? Probably just the darkness, the many closed cupboards, and the icebox, which I didn’t know how to name.
Ten Favorites: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Ten Favorites: Can We Still Grind Corn?
Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago.
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: Adrienne Rich and Colette
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Can We Still Grind Corn? Wolf Pen Mill, Kentucky
Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago.
Lexington’s Literary Feasts: When Good People Go All Out For Writers
A few days ago I spent time in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever visited, in order to be a featured writer at the annual Literary Feasts, which supports the Lexington Public Library.
The Times They Are a-Changing
Sometimes, not too many times, I find myself complaining that things have stopped moving forward and even begun moving backwards after the heady transformations of customs and attitudes that changed my life in the 1970’s.
Seduction Alert
When I visit Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of the part of the state that would have sided with the Confederacy if President Lincoln hadn’t prevented it, I remember Stephen Foster’s “Old Sweet Song.” Is there anywhere else in the world that has such lush enormous maples, magnificent Tulip Poplars, hedges of spun sugar white flowers I can’t identify? Or such blocks of handsome turn of the century houses, as in Fayette Park, each with its distinctive Richardsonian bay window or Victorian white trim, each set at a comfortable distance from its neighbors in a broad pad of Bluegrass lawn and flower borders?