Finally got around to uploading pictures from the family "reunion" (or sorts) at the farm in Kentucky.
My dad's family owns a farm in Vanceburg, which is in northeastern Kentucky, along the Ohio river. Kentucky is always an intereting visit, I've been there a handful of times over the years, but this was probably my first "adult" visit to Vanceburg and the surrounding area. It's a nowhere, do nothing town, practicaly empty at all hours of the day.
We were there during a heat wave (that seemingly encompased the whole middle part of the United States), and it was open-an-over hot, all the time, even at night. It was the kind of weather where you think you can do normal things like walk a few yards, but are left damp and gross at the end of your endeavour. It's funny, people always hear about the weather in Alaksa and ask "How can you live there?", which is what I kept asking my relatives about Kentucky, I mean, how can you live there?
But if I stop for a moment on the porch of my family's farm and close my eyes and listen, I can almost understand. It's peaceful at the farm, alongside the creeks and fields, the empty backroads and highways. It is very still, even when people are around, and when they're not, it almost feels like something could have happened, some disaster, and I'm the last one left. That kind of still.
There are no computers at the farm, no landline phone service, no television signal, one barely functional air conditioning unit, and no cell phone service. What you do is sleep, or read, or talk, or sit on the front porch swing and just suffer through the oppressive heat.
The farm is full of memories for me, like I assume it is for my father, although his are more more and varied than my relatively few childhood recollections. I walk around the old house, peeking in bedrooms and closets, running my fingers over things (I actually scream when i pick up an old rotary phone and convince myself a spider falls out the receiver). The rooms seem populated by the people from the past, I can still see my grandfather, strong in body if not in mind, shuffling through the house, or collapsed in his decrepit leather easy chair. I can hear my father's stepmother Barsha in the kitchen making a pan-fried chicken dinner with all the fixings, that we'll later eat out on the creaky back porch. An assortment of happy, if flea and tick ridden, dogs wander around the farm, while my Dad and I sit out in the front yard, enveloped in the dark Kentucky night until too-late-for-an-eight-year-old. We count fireflies, and only make motions to go back inside when it begins to rain and Dad hears thunder in the distance.
The farm is full of memories, good and bad; I still refuse to go in my Grandfather's old bedroom, my twelve year old self furiously whispering that it has the stench of death about it. So, I spend most of my time at the farm outside, on the front porch steps or swinging on the porch swing. This trip is more about my father's recollections than mine own afterall, and I could listen to him all day. The stories of his brothers, of his dad as a young man, how his dad met Barsha, about the farm, and sometimes I ask a question that I already know the answer to, just so I can hear the story again.
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