Category Archives: Louisville Stories

2026, essay, fiction, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, summer

Beautiful Flowers, Old Trees – A short essay on change

 

Flowers on the west-facing fence line that will not die in spite of the vines.

The backyard is perpetually an overgrown mess. It just is. I have good intentions and we have, in years past, had a pretty decent and thriving garden. Our backyard in the tight little neighborhood where me and my wife live is ringed on two sides by large maple and oak trees: one of which hangs over our house like the Sword of Damocles, the other of which is half dead and both of which share the fence line with our easterly neighbor, Larry and his adult son Matthew, who through sheer attrition has risen to be the Sketchiest Person on the Block.

The other tree is an old oak in the alley behind our house that isn’t really an alley, and at night in July the long overhanging branches are littered with lightening bugs. Because our house is built on what is technically a swamp and this is the lower Ohio River Valley, we get mosquitoes, but don’t spray them because killing the mosquitoes would also kill off the lightening bugs. That tree is largely healthy.

The Rose of Sharon that returned.

After a storm last summer, Matthew hired his then buddies who lived on the other side of him, a rotating collection of tweakers who were either burning shit in the backyard or curating a rotating gallery of meth-fueled art in the same backyard made from “found” electronic devices, to cut down a tree limb the wind had taken down. One of the three conversations I’ve ever had with Larry was to point out that there was nothing to keep them from suing him if they were injured, and that they’d probably win. He only smiled and said “I just got them to sign a piece of paper saying they can’t sue me if they’re dead.”

After they finished cutting it down, the tweakers then tossed it over the fence and into our yard, effectively destroying the fence (that has still not been repaired) and damaging the Rose of Sharon tree, which was one of my favorites. I cut up the log and propped up the fence a bit so the dogs wouldn’t try to wander. It’s not enough.

Every spring I aspire to a yard that is beautiful and practical. I want this more for Amanda than for myself, but for myself, too. She’s got the green thumb and I think if I could clear it all out and clean it up and erect a tall enough fence to keep the tweakers from stealing from our garden, that I might be ok with Matthew and his mini archery and axe throwing range that he sets up too close to the shared fence line. But then spring turns into summer and fall is knocking on the door,  and I end up feeling a little disappointed in myself.

Along the back fence on in the shade of the tree that grows in the alley.

But there’s always little bits of beauty and death around that remind me this season will not last and that there’s always next year.

I’m lousy at a curated garden and I know it. But the tweakers are gone and there aren’t nearly the number of random fires being set in our tightly squeezed little neighborhood.  Transformation is an ongoing process, right? Apathy can be a plan of its own.

 

 

 

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2026, article, Day Book, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, the no-scape

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.6.26

Goat Knowing

The GOAT (The Greatest of All Time). Not the goats in question.

No one asked the question that needed to be asked. 

I suspect they thought it would sound too aggressive, or make it sound too political, or detract from the specific issue. So reasonable. So patient with the powers that be and the insistence on reasonable petition. 

That sort of mewling behavior is the most ungoatlike I’ve ever seen. I went expecting passionate, granola, dark hippies: the kind who home school their kids, grow their own kale but secretly hate it,  and are staunchly anti-vax based on three YouTube videos and a misquote from someone’s granddaddy; but what I ended up finding were sort of mainline libertarians and a few religious democrats.

Goats. I mean goats. not GOAT, which is an acronym, but we’re not talking about Ali here either, and unless you’re talking about Muhammad Ali, there is no one else in the history of sport or culture that has earned the title Greatest of All Time. Yes, we’re in Louisville and yes this Ali’s hometown. But the town hall meeting in the Southwest Branch of the library was about goats. 

We goats are not alone.

Now I know a little about goats. It was the pandemic year and Amanda wanted to borrow these four goats for a few weeks from a local woman who was 46 weeks pregnant and her goats had eaten her property down to dirt. She used the wool to create her own thread to sew some really very lovely textiles. She showed up with the goats in the back seat of a grocery getter, a mini van like the one my friend George couldn’t get stolen from the heart of Hell’s Kitchen (before Hell’s Kitchen got all gentrified, back when it had grit and teeth and even the NYPD was scared to go in after dark). Goats will eat pretty much anything, including poison ivy, which is great. But the only other thing they do with rapid frequency besides eat is shit, little tiny bullets seeds of everything they eat, so they spread poison ivy at approximately  the same rate that they eat it unless you keep up with the shit shoveling. We managed to keep them for about a week and a half before they had to go home. The four goats — Boone, Betty, Merlin, and Wally — used to live on the back porch and would stare at us through the windows, like they were watching TV. Chew, watch, and shit: like someone watching America’s Got Talent. They got out once when our housemate was taking out the garbage and didn’t close the gate completely. They stood at the end of the driveway like they were waiting on an Uber until my wife shook a coffee can of goat treats and they hustled straight back in. 

So the town hall meeting went the way you’d expect. The metro council member, Jennifer Chappell (D-15) made it clear she did not write the updated ordinance that would make it impossible for anyone to keep goats because the new ordinance increased the minimum lot size. Clearly, it was written by someone whose experience with livestock was limited to a petting zoo, and Ms. Chappell struck the perfect tone of being slightly out of her depth but focused and interested in learning more. It’s only fair; either you know goats or you don’t know goats. The learning curve isn’t too steep, but you can definitely tell you’re on a rocky incline. The Best speakers were a man from an animal rescue, which is God’s Good Work as far as I’m concerned, and a woman who grew up on a farm in Western Kentucky who knew exactly the acreage required to be considered an urban farm by the USDA. There was one speaker who spoke quite articulately about his wife’s spiritual experience with sheep, which brought to mind the only quote I know from Thunder and The Moon, a maybe not real book once referenced in the British sitcom As Time Goes By:

“I am alone with my sheep. But my sheep are not alone with me.”1

But once the guy showed up talking about emotional support cockatiels and tanks of fish, Amanda and I left to go eat dinner at the Applebee’s on Preston Highway (we had a gift card), where the waiter tried to sell us Spectrum internet before taking our order. Gotta hustle, I suppose. I almost wanted to stay, but I got the feeling no one would ask the question that needed asking, nor would they ask the necessary follow up question:

“Who wrote the ordinance amendment? And who’s goat shit in their corn flakes?”

  1. As Time Goes By. Series 5, Episode 5. 1996. ↩︎
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2025, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose

held deep in the crevices of their hands

You’ve been here before. Pause to light your pipe — today, an odd combination of Hap O’ the Wynd and Orlick Flat Cut, both wakeful and soothing as well as peppery and strongly aromatic — take a sip of coffee and breathe. Tell the dog to quit eating cat shit out of the litter box under the basement stairs. It’s never a question of an absence of language. This has not ever been the problem. If it’s anything, the problem is that there’s too many words rushing and the process is mostly catching every third and fifth word to string something like cohesive thoughts together.

Whether you’re certain or not, believe that the desk forgives you and understands. You’ve been writing on the fly, living in the moments, staying with the current. squeezing minutes into seconds into milliseconds into quantum time along a never-ending event horizon. The desk understands. It’s a rooted and solid thing, as if it grew out of the ground here centuries ago, as if the desk grew into itself and the house was simply built around it. Trust in the wisdom of heavy things. Trust in the wisdom of the air. Trust in the swirl of tobacco smoke and coffee and words and the heart of her that sleeps upstairs.

Sing, John Prine, sing of this old Kentucky home. We’ve been here before. River pebbles get shook loose by the current. After enough years, we become sand. This is the truth that old river captains, old men on the mountains, and the crones hold in the deep crevices in their hands. Jobs and lives ride currents few people bother to understand. At least you bother to try and understand.

The coffee cup is empty and the pipe bowl is full of tobacco ash. These are not permanent states of being, even in this economy. Neither is this. You’ve been here before.

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