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Terri Collins: Why I Will Return to Adair County, KY Terri Collins writes: "I recently came across something my father, Dave Rosenbaum, wrote a couple of years ago on the ColumbiaMagazine.com website. It was about how our ancestors settled, quite unintentionally, in Adair County, KY. (History: On Stanley Rosenbaum's birthday, the story of the family in Adair Co. -CM) The last line read:" Four generations later there are no remaining Rosenbaums in Adair.By Terri Collins I have not been back to Adair County, Kentucky for at least a year. Maybe longer, in fact. It's odd, this extended absence from Adair County, because it is something I could never have envisioned in my younger years. Growing up, my family regularly made the 2-hour pilgrimage from the big city of Frankfort to rural Adair County in the family car. These trips were always big events in my mind because not only would I get to see one set of grandparents, I would get to see both. This was because my mother's parents lived not more than a few miles down the road in Bakerton from my father's parents in Fairplay. Most kids I knew didn't have this kind of two-for-one bonus and had to see their grandparents in separate visits. It was different for me, though, and I was lucky that way. The last time I went to Adair County it was to visit the gravesites of my grandparents, both sets. This is something that my father and usually my mother do every year on or around Memorial Day. But it is something I prefer to do alone and the day I choose is almost always random, unassociated with any particular event. I bring flowers, real living flowers, lay them at the headstones and sit on the ground with my knees tucked under me. I sit quietly. I listen to what's around me; bird songs and the soft swaying sound the tree branches make as they are touched by the breeze. I feel the heat of the sun warm my face. It is one of the few times that my mind is completely quiet and undistracted by a tv, phone, or computer. And as I sit there in solitude and calm, I sometimes have mental conversations with my grandparents or offer up things that are something like prayers. I sometimes ask for their help or guidance; or sometimes I just remember who they were to me. Sitting there in the quiet solitude of the cemetery, I think of my grandparents' lives and imagine that they must have had a great appreciation of all things natural and beautiful that surrounded them. For as country folk, these things would have woven themselves into their daily lives and work; would have had immense importance in how they were able to make their way in the world. And when I am imagining how their lives might have been, I both envy them and long for the simplicity in which they existed. After all, they had no notion of cell phones, of virtual reality, of computer chips. And because of that, I believe that they were more present in both themselves and the world around them. Their lives were not easy; I do not make that mistake. But there was perhaps a more honest and genuine connection with people and nature that is just not part of the typical life today; of my life today. It's peculiar what I remember when I'm at the gravesites. I have very vivid memories, oddly enough, of my Grandpa Stanley Rosenbaum, my father's father. These memories always surprise me because he passed when I was very young, only about 5 years old. So while the memories I have are few, they are extremely powerful and almost always associated with some sort of sensory experience. For example, I remember as a very little girl walking the farm with him (or even being carried by him) and in particular going out into the barn. The soft, peppery smell of hay calls him to mind like no other thing in this world. Many of the sensory things about a pasture, too, evoke vivid memories of him. Things like the smell of manure, which I know is crazy but I actually like in some strange way; the peaceful way it feels to look out over a pasture at cattle grazing, easy and slow; how they may actually notice you and give you a lazy glance while they're chewing. I also remember the smell of his pipe tobacco and how he looked in his chair, enjoying it at his ease in the evenings. I recall with great clarity the color and feel of a blandish-green, button-up work shirt he often wore and the way his steps seemed always happy. How he would make a merry, grand occasion of giving me a shiny quarter each time he saw me. I can still see the look of his face as he'd pull that shiny coin out of his front pants pocket. He had a steady, joyful air about him. And though these are the memories I have, I sometimes wonder if they are real or if they are false memories my mind has constructed from things I've heard or from photographs. In the end, it doesn't really matter I suppose where they come from; only that I remember something about the essence of who he was. I could write a book, and in fact may someday, about the memories I have of both my maternal and paternal grandparents' homes, about who they were as people, and about how they lived their lives. Their homes are now owned by strangers to me; and so when I do go back to Adair County and drive by where they used to live, it is odd to look on those places that were as familiar to me as my own hand and not be able to go in. Even if I could physically enter the houses, nothing would be the same because the people I love are no longer there. The places I inhabited on those many visits to my grandparents' houses are no longer mine enough to enter. However, those frequent visits to Adair County all throughout my childhood and early adult life made it feel something like home, and rooted in me a sense of connectedness that I have not felt as strongly with any other place I've ever lived in or visited. And so, when I came upon what my father wrote the other day, I felt sad that the chain of generations in that very special place has now been broken; and broken by the generation that is mine. I was raised in the suburbs; spent childhood riding my bicycle through (and well beyond) the safety of the subdivision, playing chalk-drawn hopscotch with the neighborhood kids on the paved street in front of the house, and swimming in the in-ground pool in the backyard. I am essentially a city girl when you get right down to it. Snakes send waves of terror and repulsion through my very soul. I have no idea how to live in the country. Yet....as a girl I also loved climbing trees, exploring the creek that ran through a wooded area behind our house, catching the craw-dads in it with my hands, and lying in the grass, barefoot, observing the billowy white clouds moving slowing above me. Could there be a country girl buried somewhere underneath all that city in me? Maybe.....I hope so, in fact; because when I think about where I'd like to be once my working life is over and there are substantially fewer years left in front of me than behind me, I am always drawn intensely back to Adair County in my mind. I have been told that there's a bit of land in Adair County that may someday be mine. If that is so, you will likely find me on that land again. And while I may not be living as my grandparents did, working a farm or tending to crops or cattle, I might just be able to build a lovely little house set back on one of the many rolling hills the county has such an abundance of, and enjoy those things I enjoyed as a child at my grandparents' homes - the smells and sounds of nature and the general sense of well-being that can come from living quietly and simply in the country. I hope that happens. And if it does, then the break in the chain of generations may be mended....for a time. Written by Terri Rosenbaum Collins This story was posted on 2018-03-27 07:29:25
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