For today’s installment of “Falling Back in Love with America,” Andy Hickman is handing the mic over to his wife, Keturah, who takes us on a tour though rural Missouri, where she grew up.
For her whole life Keturah has been, to borrow a phrase from Andy, an “internal exile” in this country. Her family moved around a lot. Keturah is the eldest of 12 siblings, and her family is religious and loyal to tradition; as such, she was born at home and doesn’t have a Social Security number. Still today, by and large, she rejects the trappings of modernity—things like makeup, jeans, a smartphone, and shoes, if she can help it—in favor of the old ways. When I met her in Montana, she was tatting lace with threads and a shuttle. Probably more than anyone I’ve ever met, Keturah embodies the contradictions, the domestic traditions, and the earthiness that I see as being both completely American and in desperately short supply today.
Keturah, now heavily pregnant, and Andy are installed in their home in the Adirondacks, but in this essay she takes us back to the early months of her pregnancy, when she was just imagining how her new life as a mother would look, and reflecting on her own history, back in the northern edge of the Ozarks. It’s a meditation on growing up, and transitioning from maiden to mother—and on the virtues of living a simple life. —Suzy Weiss
Andy and I stood in a snowy holler where the ghosts from my childhood roamed. As I looked over the land where my favorite home had been, I felt the first flutterings of our own child move inside my womb. For six months we’d been traveling the United States, in an effort to see if we could fall back in love with our country. Andy and I had each grown disillusioned with it over the years for our own reasons, but I’d never stopped loving this holler near Bland, Missouri.
We had just put an offer on a cheap house we found on Zillow, sight unseen, in the Adirondacks. The bank was waiting on our down payment, but before finalizing the sale, we went on a tour of my childhood homes in rural Missouri.
In order to love an American, one must know the rivers and forests that produced them.
We’d just been in a small hamlet called Freedom, to see the little red house where I was born. Our own child, too, would be birthed at home, in the house we hoped to buy. I was born and bred in the old ways, and our children would be, too. Showing Andy these parts of my life was a way of proving to him I wasn’t making it up as we went, being traditional wasn’t a trend for me.
Our children, taking after me, will be fifth-generation undocumented—Americans with no birth certificate or Social Security number. They will be homeschooled and taught the art of hospitality to strangers and friends alike, as I was, in Bland.