The X Issue

Since I pulled myself up by the roots and left Kentucky at 17, I haven’t gone back except for vacations, reunions and funerals. But even though I lived in several places for long stretches of years, none of them ever felt like home. In truth, Kentucky never felt like that either. I was always itching to leave, and I resisted moving back when I was broke and broken after my husband left me with three toddlers when we were stationed in the D.C. area. But I traveled back and forth during those years a lot, returning to collapse with my kids under my mother’s wing for a few weeks and then hauling us all back to Virginia as soon as I started to feel the old familiar claustrophobia induced by towns like Crestwood, Pewee Valley and Floydsburg. I felt so small when I was there, but in the back of my mind, Kentucky was a bolt hole I could run to, a last resort and yes, a sort of home. I spent the earliest and happiest part of my childhood in my grandmother’s house there. Built in 1848, the cottage had tall pocket doors, wide plank floors and a woodstove in the kitchen. Sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, I remember how it felt to race down the icy hallway to bed, to be cocooned in quilts that had been warmed in front of the fireplace, to wake to the smell of bacon frying and the farm report on the radio. I’ve always fantasized about buying it and moving back, being transformed by it into a Nikki who could go home again. When I found out that my aunt had sold the house to a stranger, I was gobsmacked. My fantasy about going backwards in time was truly over. Josephine Hart wrote, “There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.” I know there are some lucky people who find their soul’s home and never stray, but I’ve accepted I might be one of those who are living in exile, always secretly searching for a place that fits.