Jan's Blog

 I went home over the Labor Day weekend. My parents are both dead. It's just my brother and me. He married at 26, and that wife left sixteen years later. He was upset because he had tried really hard to make it work and it didn't, because of her.  The second wife is a nice person. She brought three children into the relationship. The oldest is one of my soulmates. The second one played basketball in school and is now a lawyer. The third one is a marketing specialist.  We have a farm, where he still lives. My parents' house, where I grew up, is still there. My mother lived in it for 29 years after my father died of lung cancer.  After my father died, Mother gradually ran out of steam. Dad had been her rock, and her backup, in ways that I don't think she let herself know. All of this is to tell you what it's like to go home when your older relatives are all gone, when the only home you have ever known is no longer home. It's still where you grew up, but it's n...

  My Cousin Mareta My cousin Mareta died of COVID on September 12th, 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic. She vowed that there was no such thing as COVID; she’d prove there was no such thing as COVID. She was on a vent 28 days, improved a bit toward the end, then died.  She was the perfect Livingston Countian: She never had a job, lived her life in a two mile radius of her childhood home, living completely for her family and community, being a volunteer, church worker and caregiver. She married the boy she began dating in her sophormore year in high school, and, by all accounts, it was a very happy marriage. I have no doubt that, if she had lived, they would have grown old together and died together. I don’t think that they ever dated anyone else.  She was born a hospital, in Salem, Kentucky, but thereafter, unless she went to Paducah for her groceries or to Florida on vacation, and for her final trip in life to the ICU, she spent her life in Hampton, Kentucky. Her ...

  Losing A Parent   If you don’t do something stupid when you are young and remove yourself from the gene pool, you will outlive your parents. Here in the Oedipal South, nobody seems to ever recover from the loss of a parent.      My parents were good people. They were born at the beginning of the Great Depression, and grew up without a many possessions. They were were grateful for everything they had.     They started out life together as a young farmer and a young teacher, twenty-somethings who had an old house, a tractor Mother bought for Dad with one of her first teaching paychecks, a crazy female blue tick named Lady*, a few head of cattle, and a few chickens. Dad brought the cattle into the marriage with him, and Mamaw gave Mother the chickens.     Mother was going to school in the summer, riding to her classes at Murray State University with some other teachers who were attempting to get their master’s in education. Mother was a sophom...

When I was in first grade a teenager who rode my bus threatened, one gray winter afternoon, to kill himself. He was very handsome. He looked a lot like Leonard Whiting, but with naturally yellow hair. He dressed in black pants, white shirts and little narrow black ties and black shoes. Kids dressed back then for school, in 1967. Hippies hadn’t come to high school in Kentucky. Having said X, everyone his age on the bus said Y. In Kentucky, if you say X, everyone else screams Y. It’s what everyone does. It’s impossible to simply make an announcement. We had dropped Vickie Turner, my classmate, off at her house on that dreary afternoon. The bus lurched forward and, when we were about one bus length away from the Turner driveway, the kid said suddenly, “I’m going to go home and kill myself.”   I didn’t hear anything else in the uproar that followed. They catcalling. They laughed. They roared insults. They said, “Oh, no, you WON’T” “SHUT UP. YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS,” and so forth. I was onl...

Hello, I'm Jan and this is my blog. I plan to post essays on things that come to mind. I don't think I'll write a lifestyle blog. It's just going to be about things I think about.  Here goes.