Cheryl Truman on books

The author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter appears in the My Kind of Town feature. Edwards herself is seen posing before the horse sculpture installation/happy tourist stopoff called Thoroughbred Park, which  we at the Herald-Leader can see from our Midland Avenue-facing windows. It’s sunny where Kim is standing, but today, the park is dusted with snow, and looks winter-friendly against a generally modestly proportioned and walkable downtown. But there are plans to pitch that skyline higher, away from those swells and swales.

Anyway, Kim writes about Lexington as a non-native raising her children in a place they will remember as their hometown: “Place matters, as does a sense of history and a feeling of connection to the land.”

She observes that “sports matter,” which would seem on some days the kind of well-intentioned understatement that could compare with a visitor to town observing, with the detached good humor of someone whose flight leaves very soon, that Kentuckians “play a little basketball, and people speak animatedly about the results of the games.”

“Many Lexington natives believe they live in a special place, one impossible to leave,” Edwards writes. “i’m not so sure about that — or it’s more accurate to say I think a more general truth exists beneath it: the place you first call home stays with you always, whether you remain or go.”

I think the short summary is: Love the landscape you’re with.