ABSTRACT
Writing about my Kentucky past, I often say little about Rosa Bell (my mother) and Veodis (my father), yet their presence in Kentucky also called me home. Simply put, they were and are getting older, moving closer to death, and I wanted to spend time with them during their process of descent. My father has likened the period of life when one begins to be old as the time when we are no longer walking up the mountain. “Glory,” he will say to me, “I'm never going to be walking up the mountain again, I'm going down the mountain. I'm on my way home.” His metaphor astounds me because both Rosa and Veodis wanted to turn away from mountains and hills, to turn away from the agrarian life they had been born into, and to seek after the modern and the new. No farming for them, no backbreaking labor on the land. They both wanted life in the city. And, as a child of the country, I have been at odds with them since my birth. Mama, sometimes jokingly and sometimes with rage, would rail against our many differences by exclaiming, “I don't know where I got you from but I sure wish I could take you 137back!” And oh how much I longed to go back, to go live with my grandparents with whom I felt a greater resonance of spirit. Mama and Daddy would not allow this.
