Braiding Sweetgrass

My mother understood this, the longing for home. She was a
northern girl, born in the shadow of the Adirondacks. She had lived
lots of places for graduate school and research, but always thought
she’d go back home. I remember the fall she cried for missing the
blaze of red maple. She was transplanted to Kentucky by dint of a
good job and my father’s career, but I know she missed her own
folks and the woods of home. The taste of exile was as much in her
mouth as it was in Hazel’s.
As Hazel grew older, she got sadder and would talk more and
more about the old times, the things she would never see again:
how tall and handsome her husband, Rowley, had been, how
beautiful her gardens were. My mother once offered to take her
back to see her old place, but she shook her head. “That’s mighty
nice of you, but I couldn’t be beholden like that. Anyway, it’s gone
with the wind,” she would say, “all gone.” But one fall afternoon
when the light was long and gold, she phoned up.
“Now, honey, I know yer hands and heart are full, but if there was
any way you could see fit to drive me back to the old place, I’d be
right thankful. I need to see to that roof before the snow flies.” My
mother and I picked her up and drove up the Nicholasville Road
toward the river. It’s all four-lane now, with a big span across the
Kentucky River, so high you hardly know it’s flowing, muddy, below
you. At the old distillery, boarded up and empty now, we left the
highway and drove down a little dirt road that angles back away
from the river. Hazel began to cry in the backseat the minute we
made the turn.
“Oh, my dear old road,” she cried, and I patted her hand. I knew
what to do, for I’d seen my mother cry just like this when she took
me past the house where she had grown up. Hazel directed Mama
past the ramshackle little houses, a few stove-in trailers, and