Huh. You really can’t go home again.
I’m applying for my absentee voting form and it asks for my location when I lived in the States. I don’t remember that question from before.
Even though I had lived in Rhode Island for twenty-five years, when I sold that house to move, the only property I owned was my mother’s farm in Tennessee. So I took a field trip to the farm and registered to vote at the local courthouse in Smithville.
The online voter application tells me if the address I’m giving is a rural route, to give precise directions how to get there. I’ve spent most of my day trying to find the farm on a map. I’m flummoxed.
It’s sixty acres somewhere in that scrubby triangle between Alexandria, Brush Creek and Hearn Hill Cemetery.
I sold it and I suspect the buyer knocked the house down, so that doesn’t help. The road names are different than I remember, so that doesn’t help. We’re talking dirt tracks in a lot of cases, so they may not show up on satellite. There’s a creek and lots of woods and a valley. Maybe a pond, though it dried up some years. I should be able to find the place!
As for giving directions, my mother always told people to turn left on Dead Dog Corner. This was supremely unhelpful to anyone who hadn’t been there before. Though it somehow astonishingly managed to weather the elements for over a year, the dog had vanished by about 1976.
I am delighted to report there is a non-zero chance that I lived off of Opossum Hollow Road.
June 12, 2024 — 6:34 pm
Comments: 14