My Mother, Judith Miller for the Last Part of Her Life

Leaving Kentucky in the Broad Daylight By Katrina Rasbold Text Copyright © 2013 Katrina Rasbold All Rights Reserved All photography within this book is the property of the author. Table of Contents Prologue I Was Born At a Very Young Age… Of Cows and Corn Escalators… The Big House and a Mystical Little Boy My Daddy & Mr Polk Daddy, You So Crazy (But Thanks for the Name) When 1967 Totally Changed My Life… Freezers Eat Children More Like Social Caterpillars Than Butterflies My Poor Aunt Patsy… My Granny and Martine and Her Attack Bird… Other Interesting Women, Including Mama… Mama’s Talents… More About Pa Mitchell (The Man With The Minners) and Granny… Then I Got Old and Went to School… Mary Poppins I - Am - Not That Time Delena and I Probably Broke Some Guy’s Hand Steppin’ Out Into the World… Job Openings in Both the Frying Pan and the Fire… My Rabbit Died 1978 Was a Very Big Year… Afterward About The Author Prologue In a way, I wrote this book to write another one. I also wrote that sentence so that the first line of my book would not be “I was getting a pap smear one day.” Anyway, I was getting a pap smear one day, when my friend Vaughna, who was the one doing the pap smear at the time, off-handedly said, “Do you want to write a book together?” Vaughna’s comment was remarkable for a couple of reasons: 1) This was only the second time I’d ever seen Vaughna in my life. I rarely seek out medical care and my trip to her the year before to talk about a persistent vaggie itch and some mild insomnia was the first time I’d been in a medical facility since 1999 when my midwife insisted I have the required physician’s visit in order qualify to deliver my baby at home. By the time Vaughna was sweeping my cervix with her mighty OCedar cytobroom, that home-birthed baby was twelve years old, so you can do the math. One of the things I love about Vaughna is that she was never judgey about my chosen lack of medical care. It’s not really about a disdain for Westernized medicine; it’s just an attitude of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Vaughna gets that and so many other things and that is why she is my caregiver. 2) When she asked the question about writing the book, Vaughna had no idea I was a writer. That was one of the many things she did not yet know about me. Vaughna is just that way, which is one of the many reasons I love her. She just knows stuff and you have to have people in your life who just know stuff. I immediately affirmed that yes, I would love to write a book on a year of flourishing health with her and together we set about our task, which involved meeting over lunch and talking about things we’d learned and thoughts we’d had on the subject and our side notes to the re-reading (for the 4th or 5th time) of Dr. Christiane Northrup’s amazing book, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. In the context of completing the exercises in the book, we went over our childhood memories and I casually mentioned that I had very few memories prior to the time when I left home in 1978. Vaughna pushed at me a little and I came up with two or three, but continued to insist that almost no other memories were in there. She insisted they were there and like I told you, Vaughna knows stuff. Once, I actually spoke to a child psychologist and asked why I had so few childhood memories. I actually had some concerns that I was blocking out some kind of trauma or something. Laura, the lady I was asking, waved it off and said that most people have fairly sparse childhood memories not only because it was a long time ago, but also because as children, our brains are set on “experience” rather than “record,” so not a lot is retained in the same way it is when we are older. After that, I didn’t worry about it much anymore and let it go…until Vaughna questioned it. The next time I saw Vaughna, I plopped several typewritten pages down in front of her containing the beginning of this book; the rudimentary memories I was able to pull up in one sitting. In her wonderful book The Red Tent, Anita Diamant puts forth the idea that in order to tell your own story, you have to tell your parents’ story. That option is lost to me. As you will see if you are brave enough to read on, I left home at the age of 16 in 1978. During the years that followed, I was so busy trying to sort out my own life that I paid very little attention to hers. We saw each other every 2-3 years, then every 3-5 years and then every 10 years. I never asked the right questions to get the information that would be important to me as I got older. I was well into my late forties before family stories had meaning to me and by then, it was too late to ask. This book is, in part, an effort to keep my children from having that regret. It’s all here, kids. In 1986, my father died at the age of 51. My mother died in 2003 at 60 and all four of my grandparents are gone. It is incredible how untethered a person feels when they are orphaned and there is no upline on the family tree. No one shares your memories. No one validates your past. It is all subjective to your own patchy recollections. This book is my attempt to commit to writing what I can remember now so that I can keep that information close to me as I get older. Mom and Dad did not leave me words, but they did leave me photos and based on what they reveal, there was a time when they thought more highly of each other than they did for most of the time I knew them. There was a girl, whose name was Lou: And there was a guy whose name as actually Guy: Apparently, they would canoodle from time to time. They said they were eating potato chips He went into the U.S. Army as a telecommunications engineer. She finished high school. He came back in time for her graduation. And he put on her cap and gown They were married on June 5, 1960 at Red Hill Baptist Church. That is my mom’s twin sister, Sue, beside her. And now you know what I know about my parents’ courtship. I woke up in the middle of the night once wondering where they met. Months later, I asked my aunts and uncles and none of them could remember. I have a memory stirring around in my head that they met at a roller skating rink in Livermore, Kentucky. Mom was there on a church trip and Dad was just there. While Dad was in Germany, a friend of his was going to Kentucky and my father asked him to take my mother’s engagement ring to her. The friend agreed. For reasons unknown, the friend instead mailed my mother’s ring to her with note of explanation, so she got an engagement ring in the mail from a return address she did not know. So many mysteries I can never unravel! After Mom and Dad married, they moved to Augusta to live with my grandmother and grandfather. A very chaste and appropriate 15 months after they were married, I was born. That is where this story picks up. I Was Born At a Very Young Age… I was born on September 5, 1961 and I have just learned that the number one song that week was actually “Michael Roll Your Boat Ashore” by the Highwaymen. Not “Rock Around the Clock” or “Peggy Sue” or “Runaway” or any other of the tremendously cool songs that ran barefoot through the sixties. It was a campfire song. I hate camping. One of the first things my husbands learn about me is I do not camp. In fact, it’s on “the list” that must be consulted before long-term relationships are considered. “Do you require companionship for sleeping arrangements that involve a tent?” It’s right up there with “Do you know which channel is ESPN on my satellite dish guide and do you ever have any intention of using it?” and “Can you fix my car?” It’s a fairly long list, but that’s a subject for another book. In fact, maybe one day I will write a book about all of the questions a smart woman asks before she ties the knot. My mother and father lived with my father’s parents at the time I was born. I have no idea know exactly what my father or grandfather did for a living at the time (and Lord knows there’s no one to ask about it), but they both worked away from home. Home was Augusta, Kentucky, and my grandmother was the minister of a church there. I cannot say that I know the denomination, the doctrine or even the name of the church. What I can tell you, it was likely the holy rollingest church in that town in September of 1961.

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