(image from Google Maps.)
At some point in the fall of 2010, my wife began looking for houses to buy. She did it without telling me that's what she was doing, because we had agreed to stay in the rental for a couple of years before looking. What if we didn't like Lexington? What if she was offered or found a job somewhere else? She didn't tell me because she didn't want to argue with me & also because it was her money anyway.
She took me to this house & I was unimpressed. She didn't care. To this day she will ask me as a courtesy about what I think about things but I know it doesn't matter. The house seemed cluttered inside, but she had a vision. She knocked the walls out of the dining room so you walked into a spacious living space. It had a small sun room in the back that the animals loved. It was a bit too big - four bedrooms & two + 1/2 baths. The half bath is where we kept the litter box. The rooms were basically for storage, except the guest room which was sometime used. But we had very few guests in Kentucky. It's not a destination many people come to, & we discovered that the folks we thought were our friends didn't really like us enough to come visit us.
It was a gorgeous place, & I loved living there. The house, I mean. I met some wonderful folks in Lexington & I came to think the radio station, WRFL, was a sacred space. I worked very hard to make RFL more accessible to students & also to community members. I was able to help change the music department there & also helped with some policies. & I loved doing Self Help Radio at that station.
But I kept saying to myself, "I don't want to die in Kentucky." My wife & I often think if we'd ended up in Louisville or in Cincinnati, we might have stayed in that part of the world. But Lexington was a bit too circumscribed for us. It wasn't a dying small town like Huntington was, & it was a college town, which is always a good thing. But as I looked for pictures of the house on my computer - it seems I never took a picture of the front of the place I lived, as I couldn't find one - I was reminded of how tiny my life was. We still had to drive to Louisville or Cincinnati or Columbus to see most touring bands - they simply didn't find their way to Lexington. There wasn't a vegetarian restaurant when we lived there, & no Ethiopian cuisine either. We made do, though. I was already learning to cook. & our semi-regular trips to the Costco in Louisville (forty-five minutes to the west) ended when Costco opened in town.
My dog George died in that house. (You can read my tribute to him here on this blog.) We adopted Pauline the day after George died, & she grew up in this house. (Here's a post where you can see a video of her playing in our backyard with Winston - when she was smaller than him.) We adopted our sweet cat Boone when we lived here - in the neighborhood. (That story is on the blog too.) My sister Pat died while we lived in Lexington, & we brought home her dog Yoko to join our pack. (I wrote about my sister & adopting Yoko also on this blog.) There was a point where it was me, my wife, four dogs, & four cats. & the house was big enough. We joked about adopting more, but we both knew we weren't going to be in Kentucky forever.
Man, I miss that house. It would turn out to be only my third favorite house - so far - & it suffered from being a bit too big - & also from being in Kentucky. That house here in Portland would still be kind of big - but also just fine.
Not the yard though. Holy shit not that yard. It took me two days to mow that fucker. God I hated that yard. I loved it because the dogs loved it but I hated it when I mowed it. How fortunate the Google mappers took their picture when it was freshly mowed!
The day we left, in August 2016, I remember having a look around from the front door, then closing & locking that door for the last time. I didn't feel too terribly sad. I believe we lived there for a little over five years, which is either tied for the longest I've ever lived in a place, or is actually the longest. It was a good house. We had great neighbors. I loved living there, I really did. But I'm very glad I'm not still living there.
Such feelings, so complicated & contradictory.
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