Last week, while doing some office cleaning, I came across an obituary for my Grandpa Preston. What caught my eye this time was that he had grown up in Cordova, KY. Naturally inquisitive, I looked it up and discovered it was exactly 9.6 miles from where I was headed in KY for our cousins' (on the other side) reunion.
I don’t take a whole lot of stuff as purely by accident, so I decided I needed to take a side trip those 9.6 miles and explore my roots. That said, the rest of the story would be that I had never met this man, and I grew up knowing him to be somewhat of a scoundrel. He was a draft evader, spending some of his life in Canada, and some of his children (through various wives) were born under the alias name of Peters.
So for those who remember, when I got out of college, I moved out of state and changed my name from Peters back to Preston, which should have been my legal name.
As I was driving this morning and thinking about what I might find while exploring my roots, I told myself it might be a nightshade root. We know nightshades can be toxic.
That didn’t necessarily scare me, as my mother came from a preacher's family, and having mental illness, she was obviously toxic.
Cordova was not on Apple Maps, but I found it on Google Maps. It was completely backroads from the tiny home I was staying in. Much of the route, the road was barely wide enough for two cars; in fact, when we passed an Amazon delivery van, we both had to put a wheel in the grass to get through.
When I got to the place Google declared, " You are here.” I was at the intersection of 36 and 330. An abandoned cinderblock house sat at the intersection, and nothing else. No church, no post office, no Sonic.
Along the route, what stuck with me was the juxtaposition of old barns, falling apart, which spoke to my artist heart, cohabiting with new constructions, money, horses, and the beautiful autumn colors along with the fog lifting.
This was just a side trip to see if anything spoke to me, and it did; it said what I have known for years. Glorious contradictions live side by side every day.
It’s actually my life mantra.
So what, now what?
When you find yourself at an intersection, it’s up to you to choose a direction.
