place

In recent days, I’ve begun thinking about what it would mean to live in Kentucky full-time, one of several possible eventualities for me and J and one that I’ve warmed to over the last six or eight months. I think about this most often as I wander through the woods behind our house here. When I’m out there, amidst the auburn leaves, it feels vaguely like the Vermont I came to love while a student at Middlebury. Modest rolling mountains and proud maples. Dogs run free and life feels somehow quieter. But then, in so many other ways, it’s just not Vermont. Bernie Sanders isn’t senator; there aren’t a half dozen yoga studios in spitting distance; there isn’t even a grocery store in town. The accents are thick and the verbs spasmodic.

I’ve always thought that in the realm of life’s major decisions, geography mattered most. Living on the east coast for more than a decade counted heavily in some equation of myself. But, as with most things, this began to shift in my late twenties and now it feels phenomenally less important. The cracks in the east coast allure began in North Carolina. I came to love the South, its easier ways, its kindness, its patience. A trip to Columbia, Missouri several years ago revealed a different midwest of hip college towns and affordable living. Summer visits to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have been both restoration and revelation. And now Kentucky.

It seems like geography, for me, has come to be about a certain feeling. Because surely in a list of pros and cons, Kentucky is never going to win. It’s poor; its public schools stink; it's overwhelmingly conservative; it's unhealthy; it's powered by coal; it’s far from the friends that I love. But when I’m here, I’m calmer. I’m slower. I’m not as nervous or as worried.

That has to count for something in my latest equation of self.

1200 square feet

I may have just 550 square feet in philadelphia, but if you add on "my" second home, my mountain retreat (which is really not that mountainous, but that makes it sound better), "I" have damn near 1800 sq ft in total. I hadn't been to my second home since October, but I fortunately evaded the third nasty storm in less than a month in Philly by jumping an early plane Thursday. J taught yesterday and I had a leisurely morning -- finally watching some olympics, knitting and then frogging a sleeve, wandering about his kentucky campus.

This is his department's building. It used to be a library. And it was this building we snuck into the December before he accepted the position. It was here that I found out about Berea's traveling library and Jane Addams's connection to the Kentucky college. Its president's wife corresponded with the pioneering Chicago social worker. In my dissertation, I explain:

Writing from a small college nestled in the mountains of Kentucky—one founded in 1855 in the middle of the slave-holding South on the simple idea that all Americans deserved access to education—Eleanor Frost could not help but feel connected to Addams when she turned the autobiography’s final page: “I am surprised that your conclusions and inner experiences should have been so similar to my own when your city world has been so different from my country one. But I suppose the matter of reading people living in a different world from our own is fundamentally the same everywhere.” Frost, it seems, read Jane Addams a hundred years ago the way I still do. She found something essential—perhaps almost primitive—in Addams’s own experiences, a resonance that defied geography but that had very much to do with gender. In her sympathetic connection with Addams, she came to realize the power of reading people and texts rightly. And yet Frost concluded her letter by reminding Addams of something they both knew well: that part of reading rightly was knowing when to close the book and face the person in need: "Over and over I have been convinced of the truth of your conviction—a mountain woman fifty miles from the railroad was telling me of their schoolteacher a college student from another state who was spending his vacation in teaching. ‘He seems to be a good man, an I reckon he knows a leap; but he stays to hisself an’ reads books. I reckon he got that habit in college. But hit takes talkin’ and ‘mixin to do folks good—leastways ignorant folks like us!” While Frost’s representation of mountain dialect reveals a now disconcerting assumption of cultural authority (she was, in fact, the college president’s wife), consider the national reach and the relevance of the “conviction” that Addams turned into action. She knew, and she convinced readers to believe, that “socialized” democracy—the talking and the mixing of disparate individuals that an uneducated woman in rural Kentucky easily explained—was the most pressing lesson that all Americans needed to learn.

Anyway....I like to think about J working away in this old library, a place in which Eleanor Frost may have penned her epistles to Jane Addams.

His office calls out to Lincoln, the emancipator, one of Jane Addams's heroes, and some might say the affective inspiration behind the college. I don't know what I'd do if my office was "The Lincoln Room." That's big pressure -- rhetorically and otherwise. You gotta think great things in Lincoln's Room. Fortunately, when he's not thinking great things or anything at all, he has a pretty stellar window.

This makes me very jealous. I have a windowless office and he has a seven foot window. He also has a lovely little coffee shop 400 yards or so anyway. And it's not even overrun by undergraduates:

I was thinking that if I can't get an academic job here, maybe I could become a barista. Or a busgirl. Or maybe I could work next door in one of three craft shops. Or maybe I could open a little community pottery studio. Apparently, there's a real need. Or maybe I could just make a nest, hatch some birdies, and forget all this academic nonsense. For now, though, I have to stay in the game, and so my saturday will look like this: