We're one, but we're not the same, we get to carry each other...

Well.

You know, my mind tries to look at what's going on objectively, and it can't...it veers away. Weird. My only issues are that this stupid migraine won't go away; also, I'm apparently going to need to pry my floor-sleeper out of the apartment because he hasn't budged. Is he going to just keep sitting there even after we move?

But everything else, I just try to look at from my mother's perspective, and I want to be a better daughter. My grandfather has never quite recovered from his brain surgery last year, and tonight my mom is with him back at the hospital. My brother, in the meantime, is starting his third week of treatment for leukemia. We're still healing from the loss of my grandmother to ovarian cancer, and so learning this about my brother was a blow.

I had three hospital stays in three years, it's my time to be healthy; I just need to get there. I want to support my mom and not be so tired all the time. 

Life's too short.

So now, totally unrelated, I thought I'd cheer us up (or, well, me up) with a film clip! Have you ever seen "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"? You haven't? Why not???!!! This is my heritage, yo! LOLOL

So, this is my very favorite part of the movie, because the guys have been running from the law this whole time and have no idea that the record they made as The Soggy Bottom Boys has become a BONA FIDE hit! And if you feel the need to make fun of the accents or the dancing, go ahead, but tread lightly, because I grew up with grandparents and great-grandparents that sang and danced EXACTLY like this! :)

p.s. The clip isn't perfect but it's the best I could find...and oh, yeah, it's dubbed in French. AHAHAHA

Ties, baby

We go to Cumberland Falls every year.  My daughter feels the pull as much as I do, and insists on it.  She'll be 21 in July. !!!.  She was 2 or 3 in this picture, and my grandma had talked us to the edge to get a great shot.

We're Kentuckians, through and through.  Even though I was an Army brat and lived in a lot of different places, it was a relief to come back home.  I'll never want to live anywhere else.  Why would I?  This is the best place in the world.

I blame my grandmother.  She raised all of us to be like this.  I'm not kidding when I say that when I was little, she'd sing me to sleep with a lullaby that began, "Kentucky, you are the dearest land outside of heaven to me...".

I'm a city girl, but I can trace my dirt poor tobacco-farming eastern Kentucky ancestors back to the 1700's.  That's because they're all buried in our family cemetery in Blackwater, KY, where we go every year on Decoration Day.  My grandmother is buried there, and my great-great-great-great-grandmother is buried there. There's still room left for me, too.

We were taught how to handicap the Kentucky Derby by the time we were 5, the basics of country music at 6, and had field tripped the state's major landmarks before age 10.  The UK Wildcats basketball worship training began in the womb.

It's a good thing the brainwashing began early and intense, because it might not have otherwise survived the big 3-year move to Germany.  We didn't get basketball over there, I had to rely on country music cassette mix tapes sent to me via APO mail, the only mountains were the Alps, and the only landmarks were various castles and the Schwarzwald.

I got shipped back home right before I turned 13.  A little culture shock.  But my family!  My trees, my basketball, my Derby, my bluegrass, my mountains, my falls, my Kentucky...

Edit: My mom reminded me exactly how the song goes:

Kentucky, you are the dearest land outside of heaven to me,
Kentucky, I miss your laurel and your redbud trees…
When I die, I want to rest upon your graceful mountains so high..
For that is where God will look for me.

Easter...

I had a rough time getting out of the house on Easter morning...any other Sunday, I get to church on time (well, my usual five minutes late for Sunday School, no problem), but this Sunday...well...
I know what the problem was.  I usually just wear my work clothes to church...dressy casual dark slack-type clothes, and my black Skechers, of course!  I've gotten used to being the only woman at my church who doesn't wear dresses, I hardly even notice it any more. 
But my grandmother bought me this lovely purple skirt and jacket-type thing for my birthday, that's been hanging in my closet ever since, that she begged for me to wear at least for Easter, before it's relegated back to my closet with all my other lovely skirts and dresses that my grandmother has bought me...
So that was the problem.  I know it took me twenty minutes to figure out how the stupid skirt went.  It had TWO slits in the front, when I finally figured it out...whoever heard of that?!
When I finally emerged from my bedroom, all dressed and grumpy and purple, D laughed and laughed when I told him about my skirt confusion.  I think his exact words were, "You girly-girl, you...".  It's a good thing he also told me how nice I looked!
But after the rough start, Easter settled down into a good day.  What's a little skirt grumpiness compared to the magnitude of what this day means to Christians like me?
It was also my grandma's birthday.  After church, the whole family went to my grandma's house for dinner.  Then C and I, and my cousin, made Easter eggs.  After that, things are a little hazy because I fell asleep on D's knee in the family room, but I vaguely remember the kids having their Easter egg hunt inside (it rained outside all Easter long).  Then my grandma opened presents, we had birthday cake, and we watched the Kentucky game,
insert big sad :( here, nothing worse than fighting through two overtimes and still losing...but I'm still so proud of my team...I love my Cats!...
I was sitting around the table with my mom, and my grandma, and my aunt, and my cousin, and my daughter...everyone else was in the family room or the living room or elsewhere...and my grandma boasted about how she still had her eastern Kentucky accent...and my mom and my aunt said, no, not like you used to, and then they all started talking over each other in this old language...the language they all had forty years ago when they still lived in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.
I just remember feeling so lucky, sharing amused glances with my daughter and my cousin, that we all shared a moment like that, together, in 2005.  Every holiday seems like a precious gift, to make just one more memory with your family.

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!

On Family Vacations

My aunt is home from the hospital and things are okay...she had surgery while she was in there, and lots of tests, and still no clear answers.  But she is feeling better, and so we're thankful, and still praying.
We're going down to my mom's (and grandma's and aunt's) hometown down in the mountains of eastern Kentucky this weekend.  For Decoration.  Or, to the kids, for the vacation where the whole family hangs out by the pool for a few days, except on Sunday when we go to the family cemetery in the holler and decorate great-grandparent's and great-great-grandparent's and countless aunts', uncles', and cousins' graves.
The new twist to this story in the past couple of years is that both my aunt (the one who just got out of the hospital) and my mom have put up their tombstones already there, next to my great-grandparents.  My mom and my aunt are still alive, but we can stand now over their gravesite.
I understand, them wanting to get this taken care of so we don't have to when the time comes.  But it was such a shock the first year, walking up that hill to Ma and Pa's graves and coming across my mother's.  I cried.  That time will come soon enough without a reminder, you know?  But I'm thankful my mother was there to comfort me, just like she always has been.