I once packed a mason jar of soil
from my parents’ yard to Oklahoma.
I was seven months pregnant,
and it was the last time
I’d visit Kentucky before the
birth of my first child.
I sat that jar on a shelf in my kitchen
right beside the door
where I’d see it every time
I left the house.
Sometimes, I’d open the lid
and run it through my fingers,
busting clumps into fine silk
the soft shade of brown
always beneath my feet as a child,
always on my mind then,
carrying me back to
those hills where I was born.
The very dirt my daddy
plowed up each year to grow a garden,
the very dirt I had mixed into mud
and rubbed all over my body.
Home pulled harder at my heart
the bigger my belly grew.
I intended to place my jar
in the delivery room
beneath my bed,
beneath me,
beneath my baby,
so he would be born over Kentucky soil.
I kept grasping for ways to
pull Kentucky back to me,
to piece it into every nook of my life
the way Mamaw stitched tattered clothes into quilts.
The way she would turn scraps
into Sunday meals flipping hot
pones of cornbread from a cast iron
skillet to fill our bellies.
When I went into labor,
we panicked,
and forgot the jar
on the shelf in the kitchen
right beside the door.
I thought about it later,
after he was born.
My son, an Okie, not a Kentuckian.
A different homeland than my own.
I wept a mournful ballad of tears.
We moved back to Kentucky when he was three.
He looked at me and asked, “Mama, where’s the wind?”
The wind in his bones as the hills are in mine.
But years later, I see Kentucky is in his roots.
I realize it works its way into his veins
because his blood is my blood.
I still have my mason jar of soil
on a bookshelf in the bedroom.
2024 Finalist Submission for Penned: Poetry