La Vie Boheme

"Only be sure always to call it please, 'research'."

I spent a good bit of time this weekend talking to my mom about her childhood, trying to get a feel for what life was like for her growing up--in addition to being interesting and informative, I was also trying to figure out how I want to do this story, which is currently sitting in my notebook as two pages of notes and mocking me.

Today, all I learned is that the region I'm planning to write about is in the Cumberland Mountains.

First and foremost: my mother's family was poor. Insanely poor. But they didn't know it, because everybody around them was poor too. They were, however, genteel poor. My mother described it as the difference between having clean curtains handmade from feedsacks on the windows and having a sheet thrown up on the windows, or worse, having nothing at all on the windows. According to her, nobody went hungry, they always had something to wear--even if some of it was underwear made from the aforementioned feedsacks. It's true, my mother's early life was, essentially, an early Dolly Parton or Loretta Lynn song. (Incidentally, I discovered my father's family was also poor, but they were not quite so genteel. Had there been railroad tracks through that part of Kentucky, my father's family would have been on the wrong side of them.)

There was no running water or indoor plumbing in the area. As a matter of fact, my grandma's father, who lived close by and was by all accounts a very mean old man, refused to have indoor plumbing, on the theory that it was foul and disgusting to shit indoors where you slept and ate. There was, however, electricity. There was a well on the property, from which on one occasion, my mom and her youngest brother got hepatitis. The school was a one-room school. Around the time Mom was seven or eight, the family moved to Detroit, like a lot of Kentucky families post-WWII.

Because they lived in a crowded apartment (five or six people in the equivalent of a very small one-bedroom) with no land to speak of, my grandma insisted that they go back to Kentucky every summer so she could plant a garden (which, in all honesty, was probably keeping them fed for the year). They left before the end of the school year. Mom said, "I don't think I finished a year at school until I was in high school. It's a wonder we passed."

It wasn't until Detroit that my family had indoor plumbing, or a television. This wasn't so long ago. My mom grew up in the 1940s and 50s. Hell, I can remember visiting my great-grandfather in the 1970s, and he still refused indoor plumbing.

I understand a lot more now than I did a few days ago. I understand why there're "Kentucky reunions" held in the Detroit area a few times a year. I understand why mountain people seem clannish. Nobody else would understand. I grew up with this family, and I'm having a hard time imagining a life so far removed from everything I know. I understand now why I've always felt like I hatched, like I didn't fit in with my family. They grew up in a world lightyears away from where I grew up.

I spent a lot of today trying to get a feel for the place itself, to learn what I could about it. The last time I went to the old family place in Millstone, I was too young to be anything but bored. Now I wish I could go back. I don't think I've ever had such a clear sense of where I come from.