Wanderlust/Wonderlust

Pine Mountain - Kentucky's second tallest mountain.

"Is where we live a kind of lost place, Mama?" my Ivy Pearl asked.

Without thinking, I answered, "Yes, it is, Ivy."

In the few days since she asked, I've been thinking of all the ways that we do very much live in a kind of lost place.  Beginning with our cabin being located through the creek and in the woods.  People don't visit often.  It is like a world all to ourselves if we want it to be, until the summer comes and more people come to visit our landlord and our hearts race when we see someone walking up the road and are unsure where they came from.  We can do yoga on the porch in our jammies.  We can run and scream like wild banshees.  We can fall asleep in the grass and feel safe.  We can hear the birds chirping, the creek running, the frogs singing, and the coyotes dueling it out for the alpha factor.  It is easy to feel alone and lonesome.

Southeastern, Kentucky is that kind of place the rest of the country/world only hear about in terms of coal, poverty, drug addiction, or bluegrass music.  It is still perfectly acceptable to publicly make fun of the "hillbilly".  Tolerance and equality preaching folks have done it to my face on numerous occasions and I'm supposed to laugh as if it is a funny joke.  Many times I haven't the energy to explain to them what they have just done to me and mine.  It isn't worth the conversation.  Other times, I'm too angry to speak.  It seems to the rest of the country that we are good for entertainment, slave labor, and self perpetuated stagnation.    

Nevermind our beauty, kindness, deeply meaningful art, old and rich culture, and the way we insert complexities into the English language that are older than the country itself.  We are a kind of lost place.  Only known to ourselves.  Visited mostly by ourselves.  Praised as home by many and few.  The world knows us not.

I read an article not too long ago that talked about a study which found that there is a human gene that induces the need to explore.  I sit here in this lost place with my children and ache to explore the world with them.  These hills are in my blood, in the dust that made my being, in the air I breathe, and they inform every cell of my body.  The Kentucky mountains will always be home.  Maybe because of that I long to understand the places that aren't lost.  I long to understand the other lost places as well.  I want to share this world with my girls.  It is thought that those people whose ancestors traveled the farthest to inhabit the world have the largest presence of this wanderlust gene.  Our ancestors were the Native Americans, Scots-Irish, and early eastern European paid explorers.  They came here to find home.  They explored the known world before settling here.  We have the wanderlust gene.

This winter was a rough one for most of the families in the mountains.  It kept us home for weeks on end and behind closed doors.  Spring is the busiest time for my husband's tattoo shop, and it will be awhile before we can travel as a whole family.  The girls and I ventured out on our own to visit my grandparents in South Carolina.  With our modern day compass plugged in, we set out like a burden had been relieved of us.  My Papaw has been diagnosed with bone cancer.  It won't be long for him.  He made ready awhile ago.  Love and the wanderlust gene made this mother brave enough to travel alone with three small children.  A drop in the bucket to some, and yet to those who reside in a lost place it can seem the pinnacle of excitement.

  

My Papaw John Thomas Hansel II as a boy.

I even took the girls to a Cultural and Kite Festival in a city unknown to me.  That is something I can't remember ever doing before.

Deladis Rose and her kite.

Ivy Pearl and her kite.

We'll travel and know the world as home.  Starting out small for now, as finances allow for small, we will go.  The limit is through all space and time.  We'll come back to our little lost place when we want to feel grounded again and know what's familiar and as connected as our soul.  We will be free.