It won't be long before my turn is next...

Y'all? Youse? You guys?

Have y'all taken this little quiz up there?

I've taken it three times (the questions aren't always the same), and each time, my top answer says I'm from LOUISVILLE.

This freaks me out just a tiny little bit...that I can be so easily profiled! Like on Criminal Minds...not that I'm a serial killer or anything, but still!

It does remind me of 5 or 6 years ago, when my family and I were doing Derby Day at the Whirlaway Room at Trackside. Our server for the day was so sweet, and at one point she said something like, 'I'm going on break, do you'uns need anything right now?'

YOU'UNS.

The only people I've ever heard say that is my great-grandmother and great-aunt...I looked at her and said, are you from down near Eastern Kentucky, like from London, Kentucky, maybe?

OMG I freaked her out so bad she almost had to sit down...I sent over to my grandma's table to see if they were related, everyone from down there is related. Everything you've heard about Appalachia is true.

G'night!

:)

Home and so tired...

Family trip down to London, Ky., in the Appalachian foothills, this weekend.

Well, not all the family this time, just nine of us. 

It's still exhausting.

My mom is really from Blackwater, but since that is up and back in the holler, you can't find it on a map. It's just easier to say London.

We went to the cemetery:

Then we went into town for the World Chicken Festival and saw the World's Largest Skillet:

The kids had a great time at the fair with all the rides and booths...I went back to the car and had a nice little nap.

This morning, we stopped by one of my favorite places:

Chelsea and I got our pictures taken...I don't know why Chelsea has such a peculiar expression on her face - she's wearing a pretty skirt! 

We spent money inside...we always do:

We stopped at Berea...here's some painted hands:

We visited my favorite gallery:

We also stopped and got fudge but I didn't take a picture of that because it's not fair. No chocolate, no peanuts - I can't eat any of the good stuff :( .

Yay! That's where the story ends, because that's where my pictures stop. So, this is the abridged version. :)

Dwayne came over to babysit while I was gone; my kitty wasn't thrilled and Chelsea's bestie was less so. HAHAHAHAHA...

That really makes this whole exhausting effort so worthwhile...

Sunday after the second Saturday...

This is my grandpa putting flowers on my grandma's grave for Decoration tomorrow.

I'm not sure why we started early.

If you're not from the Appalachians you may have never heard of Decoration Day. It's what the idea of Memorial Day came from. It warranted its own paragraph in Wikipedia under Memorial Day -

"Annual Decoration Days for particular cemeteries are held on a Sunday in late spring or early summer in some rural areas of the American South, notably in the mountains.
 

In cases involving a family graveyard where remote ancestors as well as those who were deceased more recently are buried, this may take on the character of an extended family reunion to which some people travel hundreds of miles.

People gather on the designated day and put flowers on graves and renew contacts with kinfolk and others.
 
There often is a religious service and a "dinner on the ground," the traditional term for a potluck meal in which people used to spread the dishes out on sheets or tablecloths on the grass.
It is believed that this practice began before the American Civil War and thus may reflect the real origin of the "memorial day" idea." 

This is my great- grandparents grave... I called them Ma and Pa but my Grandma, in true Appalachian fashion, called them Mommy and Daddy her whole life.

Further down this way in the Taylor Family Cemetery are the graves of my great great grandparents and my great great great grandparents.  Tomorrow morning the cemetery will be full of distantly related people we don't know and lots of firsts and second cousins we haven't seen since last Decoration.

This is my first Decoration since Moma's been gone.  Two years ago we all came down here for Decoration and my grandma was so sick - she would only live for another month after that. But she went everywhere with us. She was such a fighter.

I couldn't come the next year,... I had emergency surgery and couldn't get out of bed. 

So I've made trips in between to decorate her grave for the seasons, but this is different.  I've never been to Decoration without her.  What do I do, how do I act without her? This is her thing and I am just a supporting player with no one here to support.

I miss her so much.

I wanna be there, in my city...

I'm sitting in a hotel room, in Eastern Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachians.  This area of the country is so beautiful, I'm proud to be a part of it...
I'm probably not going to have much time to be online for the rest of the weekend.  Hopefully, we'll be out and about, visiting old places, and new ones.  And hopefully my mom and my aunt, who are both ill right now, will be restored by being down here in the place of their birth. 
The trip here today was great fun, as usual.  My SO was grumpy because I grabbed the wrong case of CDs, and so all our main favorites were left at home, in my car.  We had to alternate our listening preferences on the way down with a shortlist of acceptable CDs (my daughter, thankfully, was not there to complain about the music selection, as she opted to drive down with my mom, who has a TV and a VCR in her auto.  All the kids always want to go with my mom, for some reason...).
It took four CDs to get here:
1.  Johnny Cash - American Recordings IV (My pick)
2.  Johnny Cash - American Recordings III (My pick again, I snuck that in when he wasn't looking.  Who can complain about Cash?)
3.  George Jones - Greatest Hits (His pick.  Pain and torture for me!  I mean, yes, the Possum is cool, but try listening to a whole CD of mournful, slow, mournful, slow...I think that CD is going to have to disappear.)
4.  Elvis Presley - Greatest Hits (My pick.  I got an extra turn because of the dud he picked.  But it really wasn't fair, because he refused to listen to my Moulin Rouge soundtrack.  Elvis was his concession.)
I love the incongruity of using my laptop and listening to CDs down here, when tomorrow we're going to go visit my grandma's childhood home, which is deep in the holler...a one-room farmhouse, where she grew up with her parents and her five siblings, and electricity and running water was a thing of the future for them.  The house is now used to store hay!
My family's in a fragile state right now, hopefully things will become more clear down here.  We really need this!