So this is what it means,” she said and I understood. We build a life to share, to pass on, so that some idea of us can live in our children and gran… - Wright Thompson

I wish someone had told me a long time ago that if you're going to be a professional writer for decades, writing is not going to be about words, but it's going to be about architecture. And only when you really understand how things fit together and move can you then actually be thinking about the words.

This all makes me think a lot about what it means to be from the Mississippi Delta; to be from the South, For me and other White people of a certain social class, it means that I carry a legacy of a roguish and faded gentility, a love for whiskey, and fast cars on riding road,s and a knowledge of roadside blues clubs that offered guitars and tall boys of beer.

The hidden history of Kentucky is everywhere, relics of the booms and busts of people who tried to grab a piece of that permanence only to have it slip through their fingers. Most of these farms are owned by someone who made a breathtaking amount of money doing something else. In the rush of their pruchase, most never stopped ot think that they were probably buying from someone who'd lost a similarly breathtaking fortune. Nearly every horse farm comes with the silent warning of the construction magnate who took on one project too many, the coal baron who couldn't survive his industry's decline, the industrialist family that burned through its inheritance.