Jan's Blog

 This Thanksgiving I didn't go home. My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles are dead and even my cousins are starting to fall. My brother married a nice lady who came equipped with three children. They are grown up and married now, and one has children. She is afraid that we will touch them. She makes sure that they have blueberries every day. I can do without all that. The others have no children.  There haven't been many Thanksgivings where I spent the day by myself. I usually go home and if I don't go home I have Friendsgiving. This year I worked on Thanksgiving Day. I had a short shift and went home to my dinner. I had turkey breast, green beans, beets and a buttered croissant. It was good.  Before that I had a walk with one of my neighbors, who was similarly sitting out the holiday. Her Thanksgiving meal was going to be Manwich straight out of the can over Texas Toast. She was slurping her words as she talked about it. She was really looking forward to her Manwic...

When I am not writing these little essays 

 I helped clean out my friend Sam's apartment yesterday. To say that the cleaning was profoundly sad is to overstate nearly everything. The apartment was a terrible mess. The grief that I felt for Sam was muted by the appalling mess in the apartment. Our Man just never threw away anything, including the hairs that he shed. We found enough to make a wig. Sam was from Eastern Kentucky. We are taught to not wish for much in Kentucky. Don't aim high; aim low so that you can at least hit the ground. Nobody says that, but that's the motto.  Sam was gay. He had to leave Eastern Kentucky because of that. He was nearly beaten to death on a couple of occasions by law enforcement. I pretty sure that he sustained brain damage from the beatings. He was a manager at a restaurant in North Carolina. I never got the story of how he got there or why he left; Sam was a stoner. Time, if he wasn't going to work, wasn't a consideration for him. Sam told one of our friends that the 35 yea...

 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...