Homecoming

Sweetie and I returned home this afternoon after visiting my family for Thanksgiving, and as much as I love going home to see Mom and Dad and my two brothers, I really love to get back to our house with our knockabout clothes and our TV channels and our snacks in the fridge. But with that sometimes comes the feeling that the places where I grew up might not really exist anymore. I mean the same house with the same brown paneling (geesh!) is still there. But now the soybean field across the road is sprouting about 30 little vinyl sided houses and it's hard to find a place where you can look back and forward without seeing a subdivision in the car mirrors. Well this weekend I found out that I was thankfully wrong.

Sweetie and I are junkers. We love to find little flea markets or antique malls and hunt for stuff. I love books, old photographs and postcards. Sweetie is straight up military collectible stuff. Predominantly WWII era stuff, and I am actually getting pretty good at spotting ammo boxes or patches in glass cases. Well as we were about to head home this morning, Mom and Dad mentioned a place called the Wagon Wheel. It's in the town of Scottsville, KY, which you can imagine very easily. Rolling hills, with a little town winding around the top of one or two little rises in the road, and lots of places to get cigarettes or a tan or rent a video. People drive awfully slow and there are a lot of mailboxes with the same name next door to each other. But it's also covered in flags and yellow ribbons, because it's towns like Scottsville that send their young men and women off to the Armory all the time. I know Scottville has one major draw and that is Harper's Catfish and Paylake. I'm too squeamish to eat catfish from an Allen County paylake. But I never met a baked potato I didn't like. Anyhow, the Wagon Wheel.

We spent the better part of Saturday crawling all over this place. It was like Sanford and Son, I swear. Stuff piled up and hung from rafters and the best part was in the barn but you had to find the door behind the huge boiler. I got a couple books, and Sweetie found an Army electrician's toolbox and a Navy gunner's helmet. Inside the shop--which seems to have been built as they thought about needing an extra room--I found a rifle bag for a saddle mounted rider which looked pretty cool. I talked to the lady behind the counter while Sweetie was dragging in the electrician's box. It was typical Kentucky stranger talk. They saw us with Jefferson Co (Louisville) tags and figured us for city slickers, but when I mentioned I had kin from Bowling Green and family in Scottsville, well we had to swap names and see if we were related. Of course if you talk this way much you know never admit kin until you find out about the other person. It can take all day. But we got some pretty neat junk, filled up the trunk of our car and headed out to take state highway 101 to I-65.

Have you ever seen an old brindle bulldog? Their fur is mottled brown and tan, and when they roll on their belly they have a little tuft of fur like a seam that is usually white. Well just about every hill in Allen County looks like the belly of a brindle bulldog. All the fencerows have scrub growing chest high, but the fields are eaten clean by cattle and burros. The landscape is reflected in the cobbled names of the towns we sailed through--Halfway, Clifton, Meador, Smiths Grove. It was overcast and deep November with the dull gray-barked maples and ashes standing naked against the highway escarpments. We finally reached the on ramp to I-65 north which meant we were headed back to our house. But it was good to feel that those old hills were still behind us and not all claimed by rows of McMansions. Sure, every radio station we could tune in (not many) played either country or gospel. My cell phone had no tower for miles. And there's nothing in the way of theater or art unless you travel to Nashville or Louisville. But it's where I am from and that makes it stand for something. Home.

I hope that each of you reach your home very soon. And if you are already there, be thankful and also mindful of those who are off tonight, protecting it. They are probably dreaming about their own little wide spot in the road and counting the days until they see their own mailbox on the horizon.