all things Kentucky

I’ve spent much of the last week at the Kentucky State Fair, which—it’s hard to believe—has been part of my job for five years now, first for the Kentucky State University Land Grant Program and now for the University of Kentucky Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment.

I’ve given UK Martin-Gatton CAFE tote bags to what feels like one million people, and many Kentuckians have paused to share an agriculture memory or something from their time as a UK student. One of my favorites was an older woman who told me that she graduated with a home economics degree in the early 1970s. What she really wanted to study was forestry, but she was told that girls couldn’t study that. In 2002, she returned to UK to get a horticulture degree.

Another woman stopped at our coloring tables, where people of all ages have been coloring a map of Kentucky that includes photos of Kentucky’s commodities—like chickens, strawberries, coal, honey. She said she loved the design.

“When I moved away from Kentucky and came back to the fair for the first time, all I wanted were things with the shape of Kentucky,” she said.

I’ve never lived outside of Kentucky for longer than two months, but I too love anything with the state of Kentucky: t-shirts, prints for my Kentucky wall, even a plush Kentucky that sits on my bookshelf. I wished I had put in a pair of my Kentucky earrings that morning like I almost had.

What the woman said reminded me of a bell hooks quote, from Belonging: “Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home.”

I’ve always loved that Alice Dunnigan never stopped feeling consciously Kentuckian. She had to move away from Kentucky, of course, to have the incredible career she had. People probably expected her to denounce a home state that many saw as lesser than, as a hindrance rather than as a place to be proud of. But she held on to her first home.

Alice continued to write about Kentuckians whenever she could, including two Kentucky basketball players on the Harlem Globetrotters. And the editor of the Louisville Defender requested a frequent column from Alice called “Kentuckians in the Nation’s Capitol.”

“This was an enjoyable assignment, meeting and interviewing people from back home, who had made a name for themselves, and were still making outstanding contributions to society,” Alice wrote in her autobiography.

This year, the Kentucky State Fair’s slogan is “All things Kentucky all in one place.” Kentuckians, I’ve always believed, carry all things Kentucky with them wherever they go.