My Old Kentucky Home

I saw the first butterfly of spring today, a white butterfly, so according to local custom I'll have good luck all year long. (If I lived in Devonshire, apparently, I'd have to kill the first butterfly I spied or face a year of bad luck.) I like living in a place with folk customs. Here in rural Kentucky, where I've lived the last few years, I can tell exactly what kind of winter it will be by looking at the wooly bears, and know if there's thunder in February there will be frost in May. If I brush my hair outside and a bird gathers it to use in a nest, I'll go crazy. Florida, my homeland, where I'll be returning in a few months, for good, doesn't have many folk customs. Of course, most things in Florida are transplanted exotics these days, retirees from New York, pythons from Burma. There's not a lot I'll miss about Kentucky, but I think I might pine for its sense of perpetual prophesy.

 

I'm selling my house. If you want a rural retreat, surrounded by woods, with deer and turkey and bobwhite and arrowheads in the fields and good neighbors who check on you before the tornadoes, let me know.
 
XO
Laura