Road Trip Home

Our fast food tweak en route

My family and I just returned from a week in Louisville, my hometown. It had been over three years since I’d been home.  My family members have come to see us in the intervening years, moored as we’ve been with very young children. But I’ve missed physically seeing my old stomping grounds. Louisville’s weird. My kind of weird. On our first day back, my husband noted that the city feels graciously southern, yet has a pleasing midwestern, well, wackness. We’re not the only ones who feel this way. The city has a campaign to “Keep Louisville Weird,” as advertised on bumper stickers and in storefronts.

Now that my children are a little older and can remember new places and people, my longing for home has intensified.  I don’t know if it’s nature or nuture, but my kids share my affinity for things beautiful and absurd. So I knew they’d love Louisville. We did it up, visiting the lovely Cave Hill to feed the ducks, playing at Big Rock & Waterfront Parks, and sauntering for hours along eccentric Bardstown Road. The city’s become much more sophisticated in the twenty-plus years since I left for college.  But it’s still blessedly bizarre. One of my favorite examples is the nicknames Louisvillians have for their grocery stores & malls, like Dirty Kroger (DK) and Skid City Mall (officially Mid City Mall). Ahhhh, home.

When we arrived at my father’s house, my shoes came off as fast as I could swing my legs out of the car. My daughter and I (for a moment more peers than mother and child), sprinted through the cool spring grass. We squealed as our tender winter feet scampered over bumpy aggregate and loose gravel in the road. My girl darted into the neighbors’ yards and plucked bright yellow dandelions–so many we couldn’t hold them all. Into my loafer they went, a “shoequet.”

And the food. All my childhood Louisville favorites, still being made fresh daily. Like the delicious, neon-green benedictine spread made of cucumbers, cream cheese, onion and…. food coloring. So unique and irresistible, I brought home a tub in the cooler. We found it at Burger’s, my favorite specialty grocery store, located across the street from my high school. My mom taught art at my school for many years, and got to know the whole Burger’s staff. Ten years ago she and my step-dad moved to New England, but when I told her we were going to Louisville, she asked me to say hello to her friends around town. Everyone remembered her, including Mr. Dennis at the Burger’s deli counter. “Her order is turkey on whole wheat with mayonnaise,” he volunteered without missing a beat. I asked to take his picture because I knew it would make Mom’s day. It made mine, too. Everything about Burger’s did–the smiling people, the tethered phone, the homemade country hams, my mother’s archived order, the menu board that hasn’t changed in over twenty years. Bits and pieces of my Louisville life animated in amber.