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Our Families - Our Lives. Write-Link Project
Kentucky, 1939
By Megan C.
Write-Link Alum (2003) Write-Link Mentor (2005) It was Kentucky and it was 1939 and the river flowed parallel to the
train tracks, bringing coal and canned goods and drifters from out west.
Aunt Caroline let hobos stay at her house for a night or two, because
her husband died and she needed the conversation. The air was always
the color of dust and clay there, and the trains whistled the familiarity
that became the silence of her background - a smokescreen for her fictional
past. And this was all she knew. She lost her children, one by one,
and as the years passed she looked for them in the tufts of grass that
grew in her front yard, and behind benches and in between each hour
- the spaces where day pauses so we can pick up the pieces and take
photographs of what we might leave behind and what we are afraid to
forget. And we tuck these memories in the pages of our favorite books
and keep them on shelves so they stay upright in our minds.
This was Aunt Caroline, and she was afraid of everything she didn't
have. She was afraid of the memories she couldn't create and the people
she never knew, and her mind was at war with itself when her last son
left home. He went places she had never heard of, and she wandered in
and out of wakefulness as she painted a map in her mind of where he
might be. She missed each day and followed the train tracks to try to
chase the moon home, but there was cloud cover and her vision was fading
and mixing with the mist that floated on the ripples of the river. She
could only ever recall the haze.
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