Old Home Place

Kentucky is home. It is a home I hold, like a land in a snow globe. I pick it up off my shelf and look at the steep mountains through synthetic particles of white falling through a barrier of water. It is so pretty, but kept in a bulb, a layer of plastic separating me from my roots. I see the hills reaching down to the river, and the train tracks running by it, and the coal mounds lying near them, ready to be loaded onto train cars. I see Route 23 snaking through all this, cutting through the land of once immense farms, skirting by dilapidated farm houses and cemeteries of forgotten people, where the brush has been allowed to grow too high.

I see it, and on this day, I travel that road, on the way to see my grandmother, who is nearing 85 years old. I am in the  globe, and the mountains fold down around me, like someone is closing a pop up book. I know the landscape too well, but, again, it doesn't seem real. I feel I could touch the road side and it would topple over, a two dimensional stage prop.

But this place, these imposing mountains, are me. They made me, and are me, and still move me, although they seem not to be me. I have kept them trapped in a globe too long.

And my mother, who, to me, never changes, brings decorations for my grandfather's grave. I remember my grandfather distinctly in vivid snapshots. One of the last I have of him, he was ill, but still commanding, and pointed to me to sit in chair while he recounted the Bible starting with Moses. My grandfather's grave rests on a knoll above my great aunt's house, a house that once was my great grandparents. As we walk the steep, narrow road leading to the cemetery, my children run ahead, as this is a great adventure that does not occur often in suburbia. I see, in a small gorge running parallel to the road, an old yellow claw foot tub in which my mother insisted someone had been baptized. A relative, I believe, but I can't remember who.

There are not many people buried in the cemetery. My great grandparents. Great uncles. My grandfather. My children walk with great trepidation, as to not walk over a grave, but in their care, they walk over my great grandparents, anyway. The knoll is soft and wet, and kelly green moss grows where grass can't.

My mother hands me holly to fill the small vases on either side of my grandpa's stone. She hands Amelia a nativity scene, and she places it with uncertainty in several locations before deciding it is best suited to sit in front of grandpa's name engraved on the stone. John Cassady. I see him pointing to me, ordering me to pay attention. Pay attention, now. I see him strum a guitar. I see me small, sitting at his feet (and he wore leather house shoes and khakis and a white V neck t shirt),  and my cousins are there, gathered as well, and my mother is in the background, looking the way she has always looked.

"Why is the ground like that?" Amelia asks, pointing to my grandpa's grave. And after 11 years, the ground still swells, marking where he was buried. Heaped up, but smoothed over with a layer of moss.

"It's just where he was buried," I say. Ethan runs through the cemetery like it is an open field. The sun has already been snuffed out by the backs of the mountains. They hover over us like tired old men.

My mother frets that we are all getting older. Her heart seems heavy when she exits Kentucky back into her life. I look in the back seat at my children who are exhausted from climbing hills all day. We stop and get a coke and get back on I-64.