As a kid I lived in Kentucky for a few years and I had not returned until Friday when I made a pilgrimage to Danville for a family reunion where I saw more dead raccoons than I have ever seen live raccoons, which is saying a lot. To say that I saw 45 dead raccoons is a conservative estimate. Same goes for possums.
In Kentucky and southern Ohio, if you've already had fried chicken for breakfast and you aren't feeling the fried chicken again for lunch, Gold Star Chili's are an extremely Mid-Western option you can settle for. At Gold Star Chili I had to hear my dad say the words: "I Want a Three-Way and Two Conies." A Three-Way, turns out, is spaghetti with chili and cheese, but it was an alarming thing to hear my dad say, nonetheless. My dad loves Gold Star and he loves “Three-Ways.” He looooves them.
Later we went to the reunion at a rented building in a community park where we ate three to four flocks of chicken. My Nana said she "told every woman to bring a dessert, oh well, except for you of course sweet-pea." I was offended for three reasons but I love my Nana a lot so I let it go and tried to make the most of the resulting dessert tables. Here I met my Nana's best friend named Barbie who told me stories about railroad tracks and drag racing and near-death experiences.
Almost immediately after lunch we went to dinner at the Beaumont Inn. My Nana's mother worked there in 1919 and named my Nana after the owner (pictured sternly below,) when it was a woman's college, so that was pretty neat for me to learn. Despite being a woman's university, there were entire walls covered in pictures of old men all over the place. There was also a pretty fancy restaurant that I wore a hoodie and some old shorts to because I don't know any better. The restaurant features "traditional Kentucky cuisine including our famous yellow-legged fried chicken, two-year Kentucky-cured ham, corn pudding and cornmeal batter cakes."
On our way to the Cincinnati Airport we stopped by Old Fort Harrod State Park, a tourist attraction which I remembered vividly because their realistic reenactments of battles between the settlers and the Native Americans were a lot for me as a child. People died and horses died. I remember they mentioned the dead horses and dead horses are a tough topic when you are five. This time I ate doughnuts with my family in the historic cemetery while we waited for the train to pass and it was still pretty unsettling.
At the end of the day it was a worthwhile weekend. I revisited my childhood home which was the first place I collected dead things to make art. I ate Kentucky Chess Cake twice in one sitting. I looked at the Hunter's Moon over a spooky black barn. I remembered a lot of things I had forgotten, like Fireflies, or that time my brother got a juniper berry stuck in his ear.
There is a place called Carter Caves in Kentucky that I sort of thought I had made up in my head, but talking to the people who took me there cleared that right up and if memory serves me (not likely at all) it was amazing and I have to go back to explore the caves as a risk-taking adult, so hopefully there will be more to come on that adventure. Until then, thanks for reading, I promise one of these days my blog post will be about photography.