Hi Hat, Kentucky

Having lived the first thirteen years of my life in a small Pike County town called, Virgie, and the last twelve here in Floyd County -- Hi Hat for the most part -- I have found myself at a very strange crossroads.
At this crossroads I seem to search through the dust of the country back road for a sign saying, HOME, and can find nothing but signs pointing in other directions -- all the signs of the places I've lived: Robinson Creek, Indian Creek, Virgie, Hi Hat, Prestonsburg, Pikeville, Berea.

Lately I visit Virgie and can look to certain places and remember times there. Baseball in a neighbor's backyard, riding bikes around the old high school, gravel piles near Dale Trivette's truck yard where I climbed a thousand mountains in search of the highest peak. But I'm a stranger there.

Faces blend together during a trip to the local supermarket where I used to buy the best tasting chili dogs ever -- one dollar for two. No one says hello. Why would they? I'm a stranger in the land I call home.
Back in Hi Hat, the faces become more familiar. There are memories here as well, and folks say hello. This is home, I think. And then, like a pin to the fragile skin of that balloon of hope, I realize I have no real past here. I have few stories to tell.

The great North Carolina novelist, Thomas Wolfe, urged the angels to look homeward, but gave no alternative when that line of sight is muddled with a feeling of abandonment and lack of belonging.
I have been too long gone from the comforting streetlights of Virgie and spent too few nights wrapped among the hills of Left Beaver to call either place home. And yet my heart begs for a place to rest.
I see people in both places sadly unaware of the history of which they have been included. This habit of taking their position for granted has at least instilled in me the motivation to move ahead and create my own. Like a clumsy carpenter I construct around me memories and brief histories that could, if hit with the right wind of change, become nothing more than a clapboard house tossed along the ground to be forgotten amid sprouting crabgrass and tangleweed.

But I build anyway. And with each task I undertake, my resolve grows stronger. My heart will not allow me to abandon my goal to make a place my own and staple memories along the walls of that home.
I will shake your hand and call you my neighbor and maybe some day you will see my face and remember, just as I have always remembered you.

Someday I will drop the luggage from my tired back and settle bone-weary into the place I belong.
Someday, when time passes like molasses from Mason jars, the wind may grow calm and I'll know I'm home.

Sheldon Lee C

Submitted: Monday 2nd February 2004, 1:30 PM

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