Calls from the Homeland

My mom and aunt are visiting our homeland this week. They flew out to Indiana to hang out with my great aunt and uncle, and then they all drove to Kentucky to see where my grandma and great aunt lived when they were little girls. My mom had never been to Kentucky so she was extra stoked. Gram’s family are all Pitchfords and Cliburns…my great aunt got them to Grandpa Cliburns house, which is on a street called Pitchford Ridge. They stopped to take pictures of the house and the lady who lives there now came out of the front door and said “Well, you must be relatives.” She showed them the inside of the place, and then called up her neighbor, a man who is 100 years old, and them all on to his house. Apparently he didn’t have any hearing aids, was “sharp as a tack” and when a bunch of photos fell to the ground he got to them to pick them up before my mom did. They stopped by the local cemetery which was filled with Cliburns and Pitchfords. So they had a good time. They kept calling me on Friday at work, because they were in a huge storm, and they wanted me to use the internet to tell them if there were tornado warnings. No tornado warnings, but I did keep them up to date on the severe thunderstorms and lightning they were encountering. They had to pull over to the side of the road to wait out a storm at one point, but then they called an hour or so later to let me know the worst had passed, and that they were all safely back in Indiana.

Anyhow, in an unplanned “art imitating life” moment, I watched “Elizabethtown” Friday night, which is set right in Louisville, KY, where my mom and the severe thunderstorms had just been. The family in the movie felt very familiar, especially the aunt who wanted to walk her nephew through the entire photographic history of the family.