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.

I am not EVEN ready to go...

But I work best under pressure...
I have to be there at 6:45 a.m., with two suitcases, two carry-ons, and one daughter...
I can do it...
So why am I sitting here in front of my computer instead of, you know, PACKING?!
My city has turned into the most beautiful place in the world this last week and a half...all the trees are green now, and pink and purple and white and yellow...TREES RULE in LOUISVILLE!  (That rhymes if you say the name of my city correctly...LOL!)
Okay, now that I've avoided the packing thing about as long as I can and now I'm getting kind of worried, I guess I have to get to it now...I've already packed the important thing (my laptop)...I do have priorities!...now comes the clothes and stuff...
I'm not sure about this, at all, at all...
Here we come, New York...

Summer?...

My pear trees erupted and have pretty white blossoms all over them...but what I really like are those pink trees...what are they?  They're all pink and flowery and beautiful, and then just a couple of weeks later the pink blossoms are falling off and have made a pink blanket on the grass underneath the tree...
It's like we skipped spring and went right into summer, with the temps in the high 70s and low 80s this week.  We went into daylight savings time...I stayed up all night Saturday...I've got the air conditioning running now...all of that means SUMMER to me!
My iPod is my new favorite toy ... I'm trying not to love it TOO much, because usually, you know, you love your new favorite toy so much it usually gets lost, or broken, or some other bad karma-type thing...
But I'm loving taking my music with me wherever I go...even to work...it doesn't even feel like work anymore!  Hopefully that's because it puts me in a good mood, and NOT because I'm slacking off...
...okay, this is serious, I'm going to New York in less than a week and I really don't have anything to wear.  I'm not joking.  Unless I want to do laundry at the hotel every night, I have a big problem.  OR, I guess I could slouch around the city wearing my FORD sweatpants, which I don't think will go ever well on Broadway...it might fit in okay at the ball game, though... :)
I guess I'm going to have to go clothes shopping this weekend.
Darn it. 
The only thing I hate worse than clothes shopping is, um, ... I can't even think of anything I hate worse.  All that money that could be going towards new books, being wasted instead on clothes!
It's a good thing I have a brand-new iPod to take shopping with me, so I can take the edge off!

Typhoon? Tropical Storm? I do live in Kentucky, right?

This may sound redundant, but the weather keeps happening:
My daughter's softball game was at 6:30 this evening, about 45 minutes away in another county.  When it was over, we decided to go to one of our favorite restaurants down on the river for dinner.  My grandparents decided to go straight home...my boyfriend didn't go to the game because he had to work late...my daughter and I had gone with my mom since I try not to drive anymore, ever (and it's a good thing I wasn't driving for this...).
We take the turn onto River Road, happily oblivious to the darkening sky, admiring the trees and the water and the houses and the boats, going on our way...
And then, the wind picks up and I see leaves and twigs flying around in the air above us.  Immediately, I knew. 
We kept our calm for a few seconds, kept driving, until suddenly we were in a bad remake of the movie "Twister", only we would have to replace the tornadoes with a hurricane.
The problems with driving on River Road in bad weather are:
1. The road is, amazingly enough, right next to the really, really big Ohio River.
2. It is lined with lots of trees.
3. There are no commercial businesses at which to stop for help.  It's mainly private property, boat docks, and country clubs.
These things are not necessarily bad things, unless you happen to be driving along it when the worst storm in 30 years comes out of nowhere, and there you are.
The wind slammed into us at 80 miles per hour, thanks to the fact that it was coming down from Indiana and had picked up speed going across the really big river.  The trees bent sideways and, I swear, the river looked like the pictures you see of beaches during hurricanes...it was blowing in waves over the docks.
The trees started falling down.  Remember the movie "Twister"?  We reenacted it in the car.  My mom driving, me yelling "Left!", "Right!", "Tree!"...and my mom even said at one point, completely without irony and with total fear, "We have to get offthis road."
I really thought, for a while there, that we were not going to make it home.  It's probably moved to the top of the list of the most terrifying things I've ever experienced.  Especially because my daughter was in the car...I just knew we were going to either get crushed by a tree, or be blown off the road. 
And we were just lucky, because some cars were.
When we were both completely panicked and sure we were going to die because we didn't know where to go to get away from the falling trees, I remembered to call my boyfriend, because he knows everything (well, about that area at least, since he works down there)...he directed me to the expressway, where the rain was falling in sheets and we couldn't see and the leaves and twigs were still flying through the air and everyone else on the road had pulled over under the overpasses...except us, of course, because after the terrifying experience we had on River Road, we were in complete panic, running mode.
When we finally made it home, every channel was covering the unexpected fury of this storm.  The final tallies:
Hundreds and hundreds of trees down, including over 100 down on River Road itself, and over 100,000 people in the area without power, the worst outage since the F5 tornado of 1974. 
All I could do when we got safely inside the house was cling to my daughter and thank God that we were alive, with the images in my head of all those falling trees that managed to miss us.
Note: It's starting to rain again and I see lightning through the window, so I guess I'll shut down for the night while I still have power.
Life tastes better, right now...

Empty entry...

Because I'm so tired, as always.  I feel so inadequate, lately, as I seem so busy and yet I can't get anything done, and all I have to show for anything is exhaustion.
We went to the sneak preview of New York Minute today.  It was great!  Because of the way I love these girly preteen movies, I think my mental age is about 12.  And that's okay, because my daughter and I can hang out and stuff.  At least, until she gets older than me.
Here's my results from the quiz I took from John Scalzi's page:




WILLOW You are compassionate and independent. You're the kind of tree who wants to help other trees find themselves in a crazy world you know all too well. You love the gentler side of nature and like things simple and elegant. A night owl, you like things peaceful all the time and are often vexed when others invade your solitude. You love the water as much as the land, feeling at home in both. Often shy, you always want to do things right, and crave attention every now and then. You fear that what you love most may one day turn on you, but it doesn't stop you from getting close to others. You are a good listener and other trees often come to you for advice or someone to talk to. You admire others who freely share themselves. When you leave the world, you want others to remember your example and follow it.
What's Your Inner Tree? brought to you by Quizilla

The trees, where are the trees?

I don't seem to be doing a very good job keeping up with this journal.  I don't know why i thought that I could do it when I can't even keep up with my private journal.  I'm usually just too tired to even think about trying to form coherent thoughts here...

Winter is my favorite season but every year when spring comes it just takes my breath away by it's beauty.  In the southeast everything all of a sudden is green and the trees are flowering and the daytime is special and the night even more so.  I go outside at midnight and drink in the beauty of the black sky and the smell of the flowers and the sounds of the wind moving through the huge oak and maple trees that line up and down my street.

That is, until the older lady two houses down decided to cut down her oak tree two weeks ago.  That was followed last week by the family the opposite way down the street.  Then my grandparents next door said they were cutting down their huge oak, and yesterday the cute couple across the street said they have also decided to cut down their oak. 

How? Why? WHAT?!!!

No more rustling leaves, no more shade, no more comforting presence surrounding me at night.  No more beauty.

If I wanted to live in a land with no trees, I'd live in the desert.
I guess I'll have to plant four more in my own yard to keep up the balance.  All the birds and squirrels in the neighborhood are going to love me.