to throw my pen on the ground & curl my head toward my desk & cry. i don't know why. the just-waning moon?
we slept in the woods all weekend. when i told my father we were going camping, he laughed at me. sleeping in the woods involves conquering my fears of:
swimming with some fishes (not inherent to sleeping in the woods, but we did yes go out into the lake & that was conquering, too)fears aside, it was exactly what i needed to wake up in the middle of the night, to look out through the mesh at the front of the too-small A-tent, to see nothing but the tops of the trees & the then-full moon, to fall back asleep with only the sounds of tiny leaves hitting the tent roof & sliding down the fabric.
we came home & showered away the smell of campfire & went to meet my cousin nancy for coffee. nancy is actually my mother's cousin & she is the queen of self-help & the only person in my extended family who has made any effort, sincere or otherwise, to listen to what i have to say. she gave bean a hug right-away & said, "welcome to the family. no one else will tell you that, so it's on me to do it." cousin nancy talks much faster than you expect someone with a slow louisville accent ever could.
this cousin of mine, she left it all & went north, went midwest, went northwest, & ultimately came back to kentucky to confront a family who, she felt, didn't know her, didn't want to know her. now she is the only one who is reaching into its past, driving out into pike county in the mountains to talk to the family who stayed, who didn't flee into louisville or dayton like most people did out of appalachia in the middle of the century.
what that does to me. to sit in the coffeeshop with my lady, both of us talking to my blunt tough-love peacemaker cousin, feeling bean's hand on my knee.
after just coming back from the hills in muskingum county, ohio, which looks like the part of kentucky where i grew up, so that when we drove east at the beginning of the weekend, i suddenly noticed my heart thrilling in ways that it doesn't when i am in here in this flat spread-out city. & after the car ride back west to columbus, noticing the land flatten out & the trees thin & disappear. not wanting to have a midwestern heart like that.
