“Oh the sun shines bright on my Old Kentucky Home . . .”
I love that song. I love the images that it creates. I love My Old Kentucky Home State Park. I love everything about old, and Kentucky, and home. But most importantly, I love that it is mine.
The house that I was raised in, my home then, is my old Kentucky home. It was probably built in the early 20th century, many years after Stephen Foster wrote the love song to his old Kentucky home in the middle of the 19th century. My home didn’t look much like his Federal Hill, but that home really wasn’t his. It belonged to his cousin. Still, he spent plenty of time there. I came to know that story when I lived in my Kentucky home as a young girl. I was learning to play the piano and I would sit in the sun room with my piano and try to learn the songs of Stephen Foster. My dad took us to Federal Hill to see the plantation and to watch “The Stephen Foster Story” at the amphitheater there. It was there that I would daydream of being Jeannie even though my hair was dark brown. Daddy bought me the Stephen Foster music from the play and that is the music I would try in vain to learn to play. I never was a very good pianist. I guess I didn’t want to be.
I have lived in many houses through the years but there have only been two of those houses that have been home to me: the home I was raised in, in St. Matthews, a suburb of Louisville and the 100 year old farm house where I live in Fancy Farm. From the first time I walked into this farm house, when I was 19 years old, I felt at home. The original house was just one room. We think there was a loft to it but it’s obvious that the kitchen was built differently than the rest of the house. The ceiling is higher. That’s why we put the Christmas tree in the kitchen. It’s a good two feet higher ceiling than the other rooms. I do know that my mud room and guest room used to be the front porch. When we redid the house in the late 1990’s we filled the cistern in with brick from the crumbling fireplace. The living room was added on. The big bedroom upstairs was added at the same time as the living room but there was absolutely no insulation upstairs. I do know that the bathroom was added on in 1963 and it was only built because my oldest brother-in-law came home with his bride but they wouldn’t stay at the house because there was no indoor plumbing. The next time they came home there was indoor plumbing. There wasn’t indoor plumbing at Federal Hill either. When we acquired the farm house so many years ago, we gutted the place. The floors needed to be redone but the main reason was because we needed to put in central heat and air. Jimmy had spent his entire life cutting wood to heat this home. I didn’t want him to have to do that anymore. Additionally, working in tobacco is hot work. I wanted to make sure when he walked in the door that he was comfortable. But we didn’t change the layout of the house. Yes, we got rid of the fireplaces but that was only because they were crumbling. We put a staircase where the “stairs” used to be. But the room layouts are the same. Years after we had done all of the work Jimmy caught himself looking into the living room to tell what time it was. But the clock that he remembered on that wall was gone, and had been gone for years. I love that story because it proved that we hadn’t really done too much to the house. It proved that this was still our home.
My home in St. Matthews isn’t as grand as Federal Hill. And my home in Fancy Farm is certainly not as grand. But I will tell you this, there’s not another home in Kentucky, or any other state for that matter, that I would rather live. The sun truly does shine bright.