I've seen some of the world. I've lived, worked, or gone to school in Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia, New York, Italy, and Scotland, but I'm now home in Letcher County, in the house where my Mom grew up, and on land where her Mom’s family has lived since the mid 1800’s. The part of the house I’m sitting in front of was, originally, a one-room log schoolhouse. It became the living room of the house my great-grandfather built in the early 1900’s. That house isn’t here anymore; it had to be torn down and rebuilt after a flash flood in the late 1980s. Then, like many other houses in Letcher County, the house was damaged again in the 2022 flood and part of it had to be torn down and rebuilt. We’re still working on it.
You can trace my family’s roots in eastern Kentucky in this cabin. It has survived (in some form) the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and at least two catastrophic floods. But it also reflects the legacy of building and rebuilding, and the long time needed to recover from each catastrophe. And it sits on land that tells the story of eastern Kentucky, from nearly self-sufficient farmsteads through lumber mills, coal camps, deep mines, and strip mines, to the post-mining search for how to heal the land and fill the employment vacuum that arises when a main industry collapses.
This cabin is a reminder that no matter how great an achievement is, it will eventually be damaged or become unsound, and to save it you have to be willing to build it into something new. We don’t need to forget our past, or throw it aside. The legacy of our ancestors is an important part of what shapes our lives today, and instead of abandoning the past, we should use it to build the better future we deserve.